What would be the right combination of work and belief? The
perfect balance between dedicating yourself to a rhythm – an expectation able
to be fulfilled in a workingman’s fashion – while calling out with a clear
voice for the policies and structures you believe are needed. How to not
succumb to crushing defeat when facing the hardships of those very structures
you know must change in order to lift the weight from the people’s shoulders.
Being one of those people yourself to experience that pain, and thus avoiding
the trappings of abstracted advocacy (or ideology in absence of practice), and
yet living a healthy life full of joy, rejoicing in curiosity and compassion
and play. This is the dilemma of a radical.
Does one work in a progressive charter school, where there
is support for social and restorative justice work, in order to keep one’s
sanity in terms of expectations from administrators and the school district.
Under a system of “do what you want,” holding oneself accountable to one’s own
beliefs, having faith and trusting that they are good and true beliefs, and
that one does not need an outside accountability framework. The idea that
accountability through public schools to the government is not truly
accountability to the community, as public education once sought to be, but
accountability to a bureaucratic nightmare, a ship whose sails are not guided
by experience, mission, and vision but by fads, veneer, and profits. As a
radical living under a corporate-capitalist state, is it truly radical to toil
away in unsupported futility? To organize in addition does not add sanity to
the equation; it stretches one further thin. Better just to organize? But then
in absentia.
