“when the fantasy has ended” - nacho libre
i’m enjoying a hot cup of stolen chiapas coffee. i’m enjoying everything this morning. as i was cleaning out my office yesterday i took with me everything that was me, including all hand-written notes, all evidence of my vita and bio, and anything that i wrote from my heart, whether it had to do with the job or not. obviously, i couldn’t take back all of the grants i had written for her, but even as i was walking out the door, more letters were arriving that we’d received the grant i had applied for. why, the day before i was fired we had a conference call with the Universal Unitarian Veatch program who wanted to clarify some organization-related questions, they don’t like to make assumptions about which direction a non-profit is going you know, and the woman said, ‘thank you for submitting this proposal - it’s very well-written this year, we appreciate that.’ my boss, the non-leader as she likes to say, says thank you for a great job and sends me on my way. so the next morning when she sneakily canned me, i sneakily walked out with a pound of this delicious, supposedly fair trade coffee whose proceeds go to the chiapas school, however all of our proceeds go to the boss of non-profit because she can buy cases by suggested donation and then hike up the price. welcome to social justice.
but she got sick of me, and that’s not good for job security. she couldn’t tolerate my pointing out her contradictions one more minute and had the cajones to tell me so. good for her. like david says, i was the crusty scab she couldn’t stop scratching. (that’s sweet, honey, thank you.) she couldn’t give me any specifics, unfortunately, but did let me know that i’m too radical and too smart to work there and that her smokescreen of social justice was being blown away by my breath. aw. she felt the organization was in jeopardy of actually discovering a justice path and because she didn’t understand all that stuff i was talking, she needed to bring it back down to where she was comfortable and did understand what was going on. that’s reasonable. after all, i’ve only been there a year. she’s been around a hundred. and i ran out of “frameworks” and concept-mapping ideas drawn on the dry-erase board from which to explain the difference between bourgouis philanthropy and social justice. what is unreasonable is her EGO and her power-hungry ways of mistreating the masses. i got caught in that net and saw the CRAZY in her shifting eyes, caught a glimpse behind the curtain, and my reaction was priceless.
her: “do you remember the talk we had last week about how you feel frustrated all the time working here? and you said you could train someone so you could transition out of your position? well, there’s no need to transition. you’re terminated.”
it truly was awesome. i felt this shock and pleasure all creep across my skin as my mouth opened into a little uncloseable circle and my eyes got all big.
me: “you mean fired? what? just like that you’re firing me? damn, i hope unemployment benefits are good. just like that? can you at least give me a reason? come on, be cool and give me a reason.”
the complete irony of her self-protection is that everyone in these communities has already formulated strong opinions based on years of experience, so my little twinkle in the twilight of work there didn’t sway entire masses to revolution.
or did it?
