What Wrongs Gally Administrators Tell You

Other Stuff That’s Wrong

 

First they tell you that they don’t understand, so you try to re-explain what your problem is with them, and then they tell you to “stop bitching.”  But if you do stop bitching, then they use that period of silence against you and claim that your protest if illegitimate because you “never spoke up earlier on these issues when it was the appropriate time to do so.”

Either they don’t hire you in the first place, or else they’re all too ready to fire you.  If you do manage to get a job, they tell you that “if you don’t like it here you should go somewhere else.”   Then when you try to go somewhere else and they accuse you of not caring enough about the place to “stay and fight within the system.”  But if you do stay and invite others to fight with you, everyone runs away because the whole thing is “too negative,” and nobody wants to “invest the emotional energy.”

Yet they’ll have enough energy left to say there’s “no crisis.”

If you tell them that it’s the system that you hate in the first place, they tell you “hey, this kind of thing exists in all workplaces.”

 

 

 

If your hopelessness rises to the surface, your problems are caused by your own “apathy.”  If your frustration boils forth, they accuse you of “impudence.”  If your grief shows at all, then you’re “feeling sorry for yourself” or “taking the victim stance.”  If your anger breaks through, then you’re “immature.”  If you’re still employed at that point, then you’re “unprofessional.” 

And somehow, in the midst of all that, you can’t simply be confused.  Oh no… you’re “naïve.”  Or “dumb.”  Or “not ready to function in the real world.”

 

 

When you protest, you’re accused of “not really knowing why you’re out there protesting in the first place… you’re just there because your friends are there… it’s one giant party!”  When you say no, YOU know why you’re out there; they say “well, did you ever notice that this is just a tiny group of people?  Nobody else is out there with you!”  But then when you gather together 3000 people to march with you and support your cause, they say, “Oh, that’s just the drama of the moment.  This whole thing is going to die out soon.”

 

Still, whenever you manage to make that much noise, they insist that they’re open to a “dialogue.”  (In direct contradiction to what they were saying when you weren’t making that much noise, because when you weren’t making this much noise they weren’t saying anything—they were ignoring you).  So you repeat what you want, but again they somehow still don’t listen to you what you want, and at this point it should be obvious to everyone that you don’t give a damn about being ‘heard…’ what you want is to be ‘heeded.’  But you aren’t heeded, even after all this time, and they rub salt in the wound by saying that they “heard you, we just didn’t agree with you.  And we still don’t.” 

If at that point you become grim, determined to make people heed you and see you as an equal, they accuse you of “destroying your own culture.”

 

 Oh, and I almost forgot… this wasn’t posted to help us face up to and solve the problem.  No, no.  It’s “inflammatory.” I mean, what else do you expect a “ reprehensible radical dissenter” from a “mob” to say?  I am an “extremist terrorist,” after all.  Chris Heuer

GALLYNET-L@gallynet.org

Reprinted with permission by the listserv moderator