Welfare Board Lies

Last Friday afternoon as I lay down for a nap, it suddenly came out of nowhere: I knew why the board at Williamsburg Social Services fired me. I wasn't even thinking about the issue, but somwhere in my unconscious, I, paradoxically, was. The board claimed that I had failed an order to pursue taking two foster children into permanent custody with the right to put them up for adoption. This was a craven claim because when the board accused me of that when it fired me, I had excused myself, gone to my office a few feet away, and brought back two court orders stating the time and date to hear my arguements that those children should be put into the permanent custody of Williamsburg Social Services with the right to put them up for adoption. The board was looking for a reason to fire me due to bad publicity my agency had received. I will talk about that later. Now it was midnight -yes, midnight- and the board was fishing for an acceptable reason to terminate my employment. Since the members could find nothing that they wanted to use, they decided upon the lie that I had disobeyed their order to seek permanent custody of two specific foster children even though I had a time, date, and court order to do just that. It still amazes me how people can lie and try to deny reality. It is so childish. But very, very common.
But what I realized suddenly last Friday was that there was another reason for propagating this lie: in Virginia, if you were fired for diobedience, you were unable to collect unemployment.
Not only did the board want to take my job, it wanted to take my unemployment. I don't know where this meanness came from. I can speculate that it came from Richard Carter, the chairman of the board. He was an emotional man, a "liberal," and almost completely blind. He had been employed by Colonial Williamsburg for many years. I heard that he wanted desperately to be appointed a vice-president of Colonial Williamsburg, where he would have lived a life of ease, plenty, and great prestige. The word was that he didn't get the job because of his emotionality and dramatics.
He retired and with great bitterness about his poverty and blindness began wondering, with me at times, what kind of job he could get. I brought Mr. Carter to the board meetings and took him home. I went over to his house once a month to get him to sign the welfare checks. I brought him bluefish from the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and we ate them with wine in his dining room.
I listened to his talk for hours. He told me, "We're going to get handguns and those big folding-knives men carry on their belts banished." One time when I mentioned something stupid state welfare was doing, he cautioned me: "Whatever the state says, we must do it without questions."
When state welfare began bad publicity about my local office in Williamsburg, Carter never had the decency to call me and ask me to come over to his home and discuss things from my perspective. He was my Judas, turning himself over completely to the state (welfare) just like he had warned me he would do and would expect everyone else to do. Although an ordained minister who worked as a substitute preacher, the State was God to him and deserved absolute disobedience (I don't fear a suit from Carter as what I write is the truth, and besides, he and the City Attorney, Joe Phillips, have threatened one already. But that's another story.) I can see Carter going along with state welfare, even suggesting it, that I should be fired for the lie that I disobeyed the board. Without unemployment compensation, I would be as poor as he pretended to be. Richard Carter came from the famous Carter family of Virginia, and his mother, who was bedridden and lived with him, had a very big investment portfolio. But Carter was always boo-hooing to me that he was forced to live "in genteel poverty."