A Conundrum

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.