I don’t actually want to spend all my time fighting with people.
Ideally, when I raise concerns to someone, they would respond from a place of compassion and act promptly for the well-being of other humans and the planet. I personally think that response should be a constitutional minimum, but in fact it is a rare bird.
More often the responses I get come from a place of complacency: “it’s policy.” As if that’s a complete answer to an unfair or harmful situation.
Sometimes the administrators are worse than dismissive, and I wonder what the point of Roncarelli v. Duplessis was supposed to be.
I think the responses that frustrate me the most are the ones with the subtext “we don’t care enough to spend money on this” while the text is empty words intended to sound sweet and make me go away (e.g., “rest assured,” “important to us,” etc.). I have never been inclined to accept empty words.
The latest battle I don’t actually want to have concerns air quality at a weekly lesson. I raised concerns in December and got dismissed (via unsubstantiated assurances about their ventilation system). So now I have had to escalate to data (over 1900 ppm).
Ideally they would say “oh wow, we had no idea, we care about our customers and employees and will fix this promptly!” I wonder if it’s actually more likely they’ll ban me from the premises.
It should not be a radical belief that we deserve clean air and public health measures. What are our priorities that there’s so much resistance to this?
We should have clean air! We expect clean water and non-infectious food and just generally non-dangerous stuff. But it’s always kind of fascinating to me how much we take for granted the things we already benefit from and often apply an extremely different lens to things we don’t yet benefit from. I’m using the royal “we” here.
Anyway, it seems to me that trying to fight for institutional changes to things often seems Sisyphean. And it may be. But nothing ever gets improved but on the back of people who tried and tried and tried and often failed before one day something changed, some bucket tipped, and things got better in some way. But we won’t know if our effort and stress and despair is actually useful. And it’s hard. We can’t always fight, that’s no way to live and we have to look out for ourselves and each other, too.
But I do love a fighter.
I think about this a lot w/r/t unions. My impression from attempting to deal with them is that they’re currently very comfortable in a system where everyone follows complicated legislative procedure every few years to argue loudly over an extra day off and/or minor salary increases. That seems to be all they have the time / energy / mandate for.
They do not seem willing to engage with broader issues like public health and discrimination and, like, the meaning of work (because those aren’t in the collective agreement).
I think it’s complacency in a system that extracts from employees like we’re fossil fuels. I would want better.
Complacency has no moral imperative but it is very comfortable – at least over the short term. I concluded that the most powerful and intransigent rule governing our prisons (and all bureaucracies for that matter) is simply administrative convenience. An individual’s freedom is of minor importance if it is likely to be inconvenient for those responsible for implementation.
To motivate a person to rise above their intransigent state of complacency requires the application of energy and reason generally doesn’t generate much of that. Those who apply the energy are disrupters. I think that is a law of physics.
You have more experience there than I do, and perhaps I’m being too negative, but I think it often gets worse than administrative convenience. I think a lot of people enjoy ruling a minor fiefdom where they can control, exclude, and punish others.
But I also feel like the most useful thing I can do at the moment is cause complacent administrators cognitive dissonance through plain-language facts. Apply a little shock of energy (!) to get them to think about what’s motivating them, what principles they’re actually defending. Maybe.
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