Dis-Appointment

I'm sure that somewhere, in the temporal chasm between, there is a life. I just don't remember it.

That's the power the DWP has over your life. A cabal of people ill equipped and uninterested in actually doing the one thing they claim to be able to do. A bit like expecting a serial killer to explain human empathy or offer marriage counselling. How can they help? They are structurally not built for it. The system created them to gatekeep a supercilious bureaucracy that exists to deny you the one thing it exists for - and the one thing you need to live. Money isn't for you; it's for your betters.

How insane is that? We live on a world that, once upon a time before we fucked up the environment, was a corncucopia. We should be able to provide for people's needs. Unfortunately expecting something as simple and straightforward as that is less important than creating a vast bureaucracy to facilitae dealing with the people capitalism cannot cope with. The people surplus to its requirements. A steadily rising demographic, increased by automation (or, ironically, innovation).

Today, less than a week before Christmas (for what it's worth), I received another summons to a Work Focussed Interview. I must attend in three weeks at this time and this place on pain of...well of course they don't come out and tell you, which makes the implied threat all the more insidious. But we all know what happens if you don't attend.

What gets me is the total lack of flexibility. That just further proves how inadequate this system is. I have no idea who the appointment is with other than a first name, 'Tracy', but I am damned sure they are not in any way able to do anything. They will have no expertise in mental health and no understanding of the issues facing people with mental health problems today. If they did I am fairly certain they wouldn't be working with the DWP.

Could they not meet me somewhere less intimidating? You might be forgiven for thinking that people asserting they are there to help might be willing to at least meet me half way. Even though this entire undertaking is doubtless a waste of time I would feel measurably better were it held more conventiently, at the local doctor's surgery (issues of merging helthcare and welfare notwithstanding - and while we still have a surgery!) for example. But I somehow doubt that such options will be forthcoming.

So what message does that send? It tells me that people who profess they are there to help and  work with you are interested in neither. How can they be within a system that insists on mandatory attendance within the intimidating indiscreet halls of officialdom. How can they be when there is no opportunity (I imagine) for flexibility? This system isn't designed for help; it's designed for capitalist triage. Patch up the wounded and get them back at the coalface. Arm them with a telephone and have them wield it like a pickaxe to badger the elderly into buying insurance schemes or scams (more accurately).

It is such a small minded, unambitious process. More concerned with its own administration and bureaucracy than with actual help. If I were, and I might just, ring up (apparently I could email, but they didn't provide me with an email for 'Tracy') and say "i can't attend because I can't cope" I have no doubt they will view that, shall we say, suspiciously.

And that's the problem: rather than address people's needs purely and plainly, they view them with suspicion. Why? Because that's how they're trained. So tell me again how that is a helpful attitude.

Yet every six months these wheels spin and I, like everyone else in this position, has to go through this nonsense. A performance review where I'm expected to justify my life and my entitlement to draw breath before people who are, unwittingly or otherwise, merely gatekeepers for a system that cannot help and only serves to divide people and keep them from having their basic needs met.

Think how muhc better things could be otherwise.