Having read Angel's post, I can only offer what my Russian friends call
"sochustvuye" - not sympathy, but fellow feeling from having been in a
similar situation, but as a student in a Ph.D. program where many of the
less defensible values of academia were salient. I solved the problem by
taking a terminal master's degree and bailing out. I'm moving on to an
MPH in public health, which is more in tune with my orientation to
behavioral medicine/cross-cultural psychology/community activism.
Part of that decision was the result of seeing other people who had
already committed themselves to academia past the point when they could
easily make a move out. Fighting the system is virtually impossible, and
trying to conduct guerrilla warfare will eventually exhaust almost
anyone. The best consolation I can offer is the following quote from the
Talmud (tractate "Ethics of the Fathers"):
"It is not required of us to finish the work, but neither are we free to
desist from it."
In order to remain true to ourselves we must continue the struggle even
when we see no victory in sight. Once one has decided to remain in the
system, for whatever reason, the only moral course of action is to keep
working to change it and to help those who are being victimized by it,
even when it can only be on a personal, individual level. A religious
person would add that you are receiving credit for your efforts on a
spiritual level, even if you don't see that you are making progress on
the temporal level.
And after all, in the end it's the individual soldiers who make it
possible to win the war. The Civil Rights movement in the United States
was only made possible by the personal decisions of individuals to take
the risk of acts of resistance. What you're doing is less dramatic, but
in the long run it may be what makes the difference.
Stay strong,
Rochel Sara Heckert
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