Impossibilities

It’s a day when I just feel so worn down by it all. Just 154 more days to go. I’m exhausted by the weight of impossible expectations.

When I say you can’t expect politicians to save you, I don’t just mean that politicians will let you down. They will, sometimes intentionally and sometimes because the forces they are up against are insurmoutable for one person.

Elected office comes with a lot of platform and a lot of power, but it has limits. In the end, a representative in a representative democracy is still just one vote. Unless they have allies, they’re a lone voice — a loud voice, certainly, but one with little concrete ability to change things.

I find myself reflecting on the times I was that lone voice. Some of them are things I can accept. Others will weigh deeply on my soul for the rest of my lifetime. I’m trying to find ways to live with that.

I’ve been talking a lot with a woman I admire deeply about moral injury in this work. It’s not a thing we usually think about as related to school board trustees. The concept comes originally from the sense of moral transgression experienced by soldiers at war, but it’s also used now to describe the experiences of healthcare workers unable to give patients the care they need because of systemic barriers.

In this pandemic year, especially, as people in education have been forced by government to implement inadequate COVID-19 policy and protocols with inadequate resources to ensure safety, that sense of moral transgression and helplessness is very real. We are forced to do what we know will do harm, with no good choices, only making the best of bad ones, and sometimes given no choices at all.

I find myself thinking about the workers who’ve gotten sick, some of them gravely, and how I feel responsible for being unable to make their workplace safe. I think about the families who are touched by in-school transmission — something we now know is much more prevalent than we were told. I think about the children hospitalized with MIS-C whose lives may never be the same. And I think about the thousands of students who have spent the last year on a rollercoaster of in-school learning and online learning as they are forced into a cycle of self-isolation and shutdowns.

But I also think about the other times — the times I stood up and spoke about injustice, about racism and ableism and inequality, the times I couldn’t do enough or go far enough to end deeply harmful practices in schools. Those moments are like stones in the bottom of my heart. Sometimes, it was because I ran into the too-tall wall, but other times, I wonder, did I simply lack the courage.

You can’t expect politicians to save you because you are almost certainly going to be let down. But also, you can’t expect people to save you because they are human, and fallible, and tired. We can’t keep asking people to be our heroes and not put in the work or ensure they have allies in the fight. Superheroes are for movies, not for humanity.

If you want change, it’s going to take more than putting your hopes on one person. I worry for the people I see running for office when I see supporters saying they’re the champion who will finally fix everything. Putting that on one person isn’t going to end well for anyone.

Writing this feels like making excuses for everything I feel I’ve left undone, but there is a very real limit on what you can ask people to be and do for you before they burn up everything trying. I’m feeling pretty burned out these days — not unrecoverable, but needing to walk away and find some cool water and quiet and some space to set down these stones.