No, I'm not leaving. Not at the moment anyway. So put away your poisoned pens, and don't worry about that swinging door hitting me on the way out.
kid oaklands recent departure from the front page got me thinking about the way that 'leaving diaries' are handled. Leaving, especally leaving political communities is a topic that quickly leads me out onto thin ice and into territory that my mind tries to slide away from.
Because this is a topic where I find the political gets personal pretty damn quickly. Consider yourself warned =/
So. Are 'Goodbye Cruel World' diaries self-indulgent and a waste of space? Well, they can certainly be. I think the (unintentionally) funniest I've read was one that claimed to be about 'Deescalating my involvement with dKos.' The diarist found it necessary to explain at considerable length why they no longer had their home page set to dailykos.com. Serious stuff, homepages. =)
But sometimes leaving diaries are a wakeup call -- not a cry for help, or a pathetic plea for attention per se, or a virtual 'suicide note' as I've sometimes heard them described, but a wake-up call. The short sharp slap that forcefully demonstrates that the political is personal. That demonstrates that actions -- even actions of the written kind -- have consequences.
If you want to use a death metaphor, think 'dead canary in the mineshaft.' Leaving diaries --especially from people who have been around for a while and have produced decent stuff -- can be a sign that something's gone pretty badly and sadly wrong with a political community.
Here's a saying I quite like: "If you don't stand for something, you'll end up standing for anything." Which is another way of saying that unconditional loyalty ain't all it's cracked up to be.
If the members of a political community can't identify the principles over which they'd leave that community -- if they can't imagine the ground on which they won't give way, the ideals that they're willing to lose friends and make enemies over, then how can they ever be trusted? How can you ever know that they have your back?
How can you know, when push comes to shove, that you or someone you love won't be among the people they sacrifice in the name of the politics of expediency? Or in the name of the politics of 'unity'? How can you know that it won't be you or someone you love who will be betrayed while sweetly being told that 'the ends justify the means.' Or that 'Rome wasn't built in a day. You have to wait -- these things take time. Be patient.'
Hmmm. Do I sound a little bitter?
Let me tell you a story.
This time three years ago I was on a strike committee where the local went out briefly. A little less than three years ago, I was one of many signatories to a contract that introduced childcare, got a significant step towards pay equity for librarians, introduced subsidised health care for part-time workers, and took an important step towards eliminating discriminatory training and hiring practices directed against foreign workers. Pretty cool huh? Being in the bargaining room when that contract was settled, knowing that I'd argued at the table for bits of that language and revised and costed other bits of it (though I wasn't on the bargaining committee), knowing that I'd gone out and encouraged people to find the collective strength to fight for it was one of the best things. For a couple of days after that contract was settled I was so happy.
Yeah, well. Less than six months later, I'd left that same union because I was too badly burned out to be an active member any more, and I believed -- rightly, I still think -- that to be an inactive member, knowing what I knew about that union's racism and xenophobia, was to be complicit. Did I eventually rejoin the union and fight some more as a steward? Yeah, eventually, but that local wasn't a source of solidarity or strength for me ever again. It was just the terrain on which I'd chosen to fight.
Burnout is a light word. I'm sure lots of you know only too well what it feels like, but I'm in a self-indulgent mood tonight even though this isn't a 'Goodbye Cruel World' diary, so let me tell you what burnout was/is like for me.
I couldn't write. I couldn't get any non-union work done. The only thing I could concentrate on halfway decently was a poli sci class I was sitting in on. Much of the time, I didn't feel much of anything. When I felt like crying there were no tears. When I felt angry, there were no words. I was perpetually exhausted, but I couldn't sleep. Nothing surprised me.
In those difficult conversations that are supposed to be about 'rebuilding bridges,' when really the river has changed its course and there's no bridge left to rebuild, I was regularly accused of 'not letting my anger out', 'not showing my emotions,' 'lacking compassion' and my personal favourites, 'not engaging' and 'not being trusting enough.'
All of it true, no doubt.
Although it seemed to me that I'd been far too trusting and that was part of the problem.
The only people I wanted to spend time with were my then partner (now husband) and the very few people I trusted after that campaign. I didn't make new friends, I didn't hang out with casual acquaintances, I drifted out of touch for a good long while with lots of my old friends. I just didn't want to be around people at all, except for the few where I knew exactly where they had stood. I was too tired. And also, I had thought I had a decent sense of when I could trust people, and the union showed me that I was very mistaken. Given that so many of the people whom I'd considered friends and political allies in the union had turned out not to be, I couldn't help but wonder 'who else was I mistaken about?'
Better to keep my distance.
So, what does this protracted whine have to do with 'Goodbye Cruel World' diaries? =/
I'll freely admit to finding the 'de-escalating my involvement with dKos' diaries amusing and worthy of mockery. Same goes IMO for the occasional 'I'm leaving cos my diaries don't get recommended' -- though they are sufficiently rare as to be a strawman I think. Ditto Rethugs -- after all, I'm known for my lack of compassion.
But when it's someone leaving because they've fought for something that matters until they don't see a way of continuing to fight any more, or because they've been given good reason to conclude that they're not really as welcome in this political community as they thought they were -- well let's just say I'm not convinced that responding along the lines of 'don't let the door hit you on your way out' is appropriate.
And for broadly similar reasons, I'm not convinced that belated efforts to say 'please don't go, don't desert us' are always appropriate either.