Documentation Obsession

So, I have been applying for a subsidy to help pay for Ramona’s preschool and childcare. I just need to get the paperwork together and I have been accepted. I knew I was going to have to come up with a bunch of documents that would inevitably be MIA, and I did.

I couldn’t find the birth certificate, though I can find her certificate of birth from the hospital, her little footprints, pictures of me giving birth, her social security card and passport (all of which will probably go missing next time I try to find those for some bureaucratic reason). I couldn’t find the form the Dept. of Child Support sent me when they closed our case. The lease that I was holding in my hand a week ago has vanished and I have to get my doctor to fill out a well child form and give vaccination dates. If we don’t vaccinate, I have to have the doctor say that we don’t vaccinate on the form (they can’t just take my word for it even though I am the one who told my doctor when she had her vaccinations, as the doctor is somewhat new to us). AND, I have to take a form into my employer asking if they will fill out a form saying that I work for them and write in the hours that I work! What, a pay stub isn’t sufficient anymore? I feel like a teenager on probation! How incredibly patronizing! All for a little help with paying for childcare?

The common idea is that these programs are here to help those of us who are finding ourselves mired into financial poverty for whatever reason. From what I have noticed they are here to strip us of our dignity and to help us keep our heads just above the water while acclimating folks to a paternal relationship with the government. Welfare programs are used to keep the poor folks with just enough (or not quite enough if you live in California where everything costs more)… otherwise the rich would have a class war on their hands. We often forget how common working class rebellions have been in the past. The Elite (you know, that top 1% that controls over 70% of the wealth in the US), have learned that uprisings are a lot more expensive than welfare and taxes. The large middle-class acts as a buffer between the rich and the poor, and if you couple that with myths such as “the American Dream,” “It’s All the Immigrants Fault” and “Anyone Can Make it with Hard Work,” the poor seem to be confused just enough to not do too much of anything. The poor are either ashamed or angry…am I getting off track?

Anyhow, since I live in a society obsessed with documentation, my mind has flown off the handle. So I realized on Monday that I probably don’t have any of the things I need to get my subsidy and I will be spending some time searching and calling and ordering forms.

After searching the whole house over several times, I call the child support office to please send me a document saying my case is closed. They say I could probably come and pick it up on Friday (the day I was gonna meet with my government subsidy case-worker), IF they can generate it by then. I tell my caseworker that we should wait until I have all the documentation before we meet, so lets cancel our Friday appointment until I do. The Child Support “case-closed” letter comes in the mail on Thursday. Not what they said, but why complain when things work out for the better. So I call my worker and tell the answering machine that we should meet on Friday after-all. A few minutes later when I am looking for the lease that I know I just had the other day, I find the original child-custody form. Less than two hours after it comes in the mail, I find it on ACCIDENT! , After that I go to my employer for the employment verification, then my case-worker calls and says she’s too busy and our meeting ends up getting set back a full week because I wont be available next week when she is.

So I sit down to check out the paperwork packet she sent to get filled out. There is a doctor physical exam paper to fill out. I haven’t figured out why they need it. They only give subsidies to healthy children?…so now I have to ask the doctor to fill out two physical exam forms, one for preschool and one for subsidy. Then there is this paper to fill out that asks me when Ramona sleeps, how long she sleeps, what her personality is like, when and how often she poops, what my family calls urine and so forth. Am I the only one who finds it nerve-wracking that I am asked to write all this personal stuff down to give to someone I don’t know to do god-knows what with? Talk about paternal! Forget Big Brother, more like Big Daddy!
I guess the government is like our dad. Our tough love dad. Sometimes little revealing declarations by judges and the such make their way into the media which most people ignore because they want pretend we are independent and free. In the case of our children, one judge noted during a case with homeschoolers, that a main reason that children are required to go to school is so that somebody (a government worker) needs to keep an eye on the children to make sure that we aren’t harming them. Another judge admitted that it was to make sure children become patriotic, law-abiding citizens (meaning: not rock the boat). When I was in my credentialing program we learned that teachers (again government employees) are required to act “in loco parentis” or “instead of the parent.” “In loco parentis” refers to the legal responsibility of a person or organization to take on the functions and responsibilities of a parent as long as it is not considered a violation of their civil liberties. While you would want one caring for your child to care for them as their own (as long as they are good parents), we are talking about the government and its employees. The government has entered into every aspect of our lives only on it’s own terms and the saturation will reach a critical mass soon enough.

Once upon a time we counted on our communities. Those don’t really exist and as well hand over more and more responsibility to a centralized government, out communities become weaker and weaker. Now we pay the police and the pentagon (whether we want to or not) for some illusion of so-called security. Communities used to be the places we lived, worked, and educated ourselves and each other. We got to know each other and we kept our eyes out for each other. Now we work for “some other guy” and/or a bunch of shareholders in some other (post) community and send our kids to an institution for most of their waking lives to be educated and socialized.

Wow, it’s getting late. I could go on and on about the woes of dealing with government bureaucracy, but it really did feel alienating and I really did feel a little ashamed explaining the “work verification” to my employer. The organization treats me like an ungrateful wench for questioning all their excessive demands and I still can’t find my lease.