Step One
We finally admitted we were powerless to make a difference in people’s
lives - that other people’s lives are basically unmanageable by us,
especially when we are barely able to manage our own.
Step Two
Came to believe that a Social Servant greater than ourselves, while unable
to ameliorate the human condition, could restore us to sanity by freeing
us from the compulsive need to improve the lot of those less fortunate
than ourselves.
Step Three
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the
Great Social Servant in the firmament as we understood Him or Her, as the
case may be, genderwise - trusting that we will not have to stand in line
or be placed on a Waiting List.
Step Four
Made a fearless and searching moral inventory of ourselves and others, and
concluded that compared with others - especially welfare sluts, ne’er-do-wells
and winos, and other foodstamp cheats - we look pretty damn good,
something which we had suspected all along, but suppressed to keep from
making the less fortunate feel inadequate.
Step Five
Admitted to The Great Social Servant, and to ourselves, and to a member of
the infrastructure and a member of the indigenous disadvantaged minorities
and a representative oppressed illegal alien, the exact nature of our
wrongs - and freely confessed that our wrongs consisted of a nebulous
blend of dabblings, meddlings, and proliferations of paperwork.
Step Six
Were entirely ready to have the Great Social Servant remove all these
defects of character so that we could once again freely and spontaneously
blame the victims of the System without a sense of middle class
pseudo-liberal guilt.
Step Seven
Humbly used up our sick leave and vacation time, and asked for severance
pay to hold us over until we collected SSI, while the State Accident
Insurance Fund could process our claim for disability due to headaches and
lower back pain from caring too much for the problems of others and
carrying the weight of the world on our broad, but inadequate, shoulders. |
Step Eight
Made a computerized list of all the persons we had harmed by
reinforcing their dependence upon social services, and without taking them
into our own homes, became willing to make amends to them, by sending our
sincere apologies in a form letter.
Step Nine
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible except when to do
so would injure them or others, and as long we could do it in a short
telephone conversation and they didn’t make nuisances of themselves.
Step Ten
Continued to take a personal inventory and when we were wrong, which
happened less and and less, promptly admitted it, instead of developing a
new set of theories and rationalizations to cover our asses.
Step Eleven
Sought through transcendental meditation, est, mindless immersion in
television soaps, and reruns of Barney Miller and Star Trek, to improve
our conscious contact with the Great Social Servant as we understood Him
or Her, praying only for knowledge of His or Her will for us and the power
to carry that out, as long as it didn’t involve crisis lines and direct
social services to clients.
Step Twelve
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we
tried to carry this message to Social Servants everywhere and to practice
these principles in all our affairs, while at the same time getting lots
of sunshine and doing the garden work first.
The Social Servant Anonymous Creed
Lord grant me the serenity
To accept the status quo,
The courage to refuse becoming
a
magic helper,
And the wisdom to disengage
from
debilitating and ineffectual
social
networks.
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This heresy courtesy of:
Morris Street Writers Group
Mark Worden
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