Every time a state social worker has to step into a family’s private life, that’s on us. Each time taxpayers carry the cost of caring for a child in government custody, that reveals our failure. Every young person who ages out of foster care without a permanent family is a mark against our conscience—our shame, not the State’s, not the system’s, not the policies’, and certainly not the frontline workers’. Those forces may worsen the problem, but they are not the root of it.
The root is us.
It is our neglect. Our sin. Our refusal to see. We are the ones who must be changed. It’s time to remove the log from our own eyes.
