Today the person that (most likely unknowingly) saved the werkgroep that I coordinate, quit. Perhaps temporarily, but she quit. I must say that no matter how much I have tried to rationalize it, I am mourning her coming absence. Once more, I feel that our system is broken. Or perhaps I am just being emotional.
To give context to this loss, I must tell that about two years ago this workgroup was at the brink of extinction. A cohort of members lost interest and quit, and me and somebody else remained, like the proverbial last and lost mohicans, talking to each other and insecure what to do next. We were really about to stop, when I got to hear of somebody interested. I dismiss the rumour (what would we offer to anybody anyway?), but S. kept trying, and I got a direct email from her. Finally we ended up drinking a coffee, talking politics. In the conversation there was this silly sound of doors opening, of possibilities, of new things to try. So we started anew.
The funny thing is that S. was a trendsetter. She was the first to knock on our door, but not the only one. In an unprecedented succession that haven’t yet stopped, we started receiving emails from people interested in the politics of diversity (which is the focus issue of our workgroup). Today we are almost twenty persons, most of us active in several independent projects. I have been member of my party some 15 years, and I have not yet seen a collective so diverse and so exciting. Also, so committed. And that, that is the double edged sword.
Problem with commitment to politics nowadays is that, as it should be, members of a political party are not paid. Whatever we do is on our free time. And believe you me, politics is fascinating and espectacular, but is also consuming. Four of us, S. being one, decided some months ago to work in a particular proyect. This project started moving slowly, but suddenly got a nice tailwind, when one of our politicians got interested, supported it, and asked us to organize two public discussions on the political position of women of color, a related and important issue. The meetings were a reasonable success, but they exhausted our team. S., who is an academic researcher, is bound to the harsh dynamics of keeping herself competitive in the academic labor market. The other member of the team is an independent consultant, who certainly in this insecure moment is working at full speed and intensity. So our team is likely to get disbanded.
Of course, I know that this tale can also be spinned in a positive way. We put together some amateurs, we thought couple of interesting things, we organized public discussions for a politician, who will use the results to further a matter to which we are all interested, and that’s it. But I know that the other side of this medal is that we see that a normal person, in a productive moment of her professional life, can not be expected to deliver regular work to a political party. And that is a problem. Because if the members of the party can not participate regularly in it, then who is actually running the party? Or, better and sharper said, who is governing our politicians? Who is managing that vital contact between the politicians and the citizen?
The answers are many, and none of them is nice to hear. It is not a coincidence that political parties nowadays do not enjoy great levels of credibility, or prestige. Now that S. has announced her break, I am hearing all these answers playing in a loop in my head. Of course, it can very well be that I am just feeling the blues. Or that I am simply missing the subtle and sober smile of S. correcting any of my normal blunders, almost silently and sharper than anybody else.
That sharpness, which once saved our workgroup, now is also telling us that ours is not the best way to organize political participation. I wonder if we can change what we need to change. In the meantime, I am missing S. already.
I'd like to know why S. left... Did she say anything?