Burned Out By the PIRG

I remember coming out of a training as if it were the end of an army training.  Some hoopla about “we’re gonna be fighting for social justice and social change!”  I felt a little sick inside, because every creepy PIRG method that had been presented to me about how to recruit and organize people seemed to lose all of that in the equation.

Never addressed was how to get to know and deal with these new communities we’d be organizing in.  Sure, they were college campuses, maybe a little set apart from the real world – but the students there still dealt with many very real issues.  Many of these campuses were in urban neighborhoods.  Many of the students, full or part-time, juggled full to part-time jobs on the side, a rigrous courseload, and in some cases, children.

The whole structure of the organization kind of rendered everything we were fighting for to a facade.   I never really felt like I really cared about the textbook-global warming-hunger & homelessness campaigns we were expected to organize on, because we were too damn busy trying to figure out “How many people are going to attend the GIM meeting?!”  “I gotta do my numbers.”  “My tabling rate isn’t too good.”  It was like a constant struggle to re-evaluate yourself rather than fighting for the students you were working with.  Sure, the aforementioned issues drew attention and resonated, but they never really made us think outside the box.

-Amie