- that a few years back, I stepped down from an officer position in a student organization because of its corrupt voting practices.
I’d been elected by popular vote. Jubilant and hopeful, I accepted the position without a backwards glance, ready to dive into the work. Our initial officer meetings were a little awkward, sure, but we’d get to know each other soon enough. Planning! Fundraising! Making a difference in our local community! I could not wait.
Over the next few months, we had meetings, made actual calls, fielded forms and filled out spreadsheets. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, my eagerness faded. Something just didn’t seem that right with our group dynamic. We didn’t get along. Maybe I was too rough back then, tending to be rude and overly blunt. (And yet that didn’t come up as an issue with any of my friends, my family, and in my extracurricular activities at the time.)
I don’t think I’ll ever really know what was so wrong. I just knew it was very, very wrong. But I had made a commitment to this position, and so I stayed and tried to ignore the bad signs.
Hello’s and goodbye’s were not just awkward - they were nonexistent. We were avoiding each other in the hall. At some point, the vibe had morphed from mildly uncomfortable to downright hostile, and most of it was aimed at me. (The rest was towards our sponsor.) There was a lot of gossip, and a good portion of it was not nice. Whenever someone cracked a mean joke, I got chills imagining them talking about me in the same way.
It got much worse when we were gearing up to elect new officers. Our job was to hold interviews for each position, select a few people for each, and let them duke it out in a popular vote for it. My understanding was that after the interview phase, it outcome was out of our hands - the people’s vote would decide.
But it didn’t. The sponsor ended up suggesting that we override the popular vote if we didn’t like who had won it, and we did. Without telling the student body at all. That’s lying, right? I’m not crazy, right? Well, I’ll never really know, because I couldn’t and still can’t bear to tell anyone in full what went down. I kept no evidence, no detailed accounts, only my emotions and disintegrating memories through the years. That’s how afraid I was that my opposition would be twisted against me. The cost has been heavy. My own conviction that the situation actually happened is slipping, because I never brought it to light to anyone but my parents. Sometimes, I think.. did that actually happen? Was I overreacting to a non-issue?
Only the fact that I was so stricken by the whole thing convinces me that it had real ethical implications. It felt like weeks (but must have only been days) that I agonized over what to do. If we can lie and manipulate records in this club however we want, our values mean nothing. Our government means nothing, because it is founded on our values. This was beyond a casual fudging of deadlines or slight privacy. How could we do that?
We learn about all these famous political figures who stood up for what was right in school, but no one tells us what to do if the school is what needs to be stood up to. No one cared that this sponsor was corrupt, that this club was corrupt, or even worse - they didn’t know. I was not the right person to make the big reveal. My social skills were not great, I didn’t have a support network of people to help me through controversy, and I was deathly afraid of the disciplinary mess and social friction that’d result. Hard as I hoped, I could not bring myself to be the exposé journalist, the political dissenter. I just wanted to escape to college and never think about it again.
I did what I could. Called a meeting with the officers, begged them to reverse the decision. It would be inconvenient, so, we’d roll with it. It was final.
Maybe I could have done more, made it more okay, acted earlier. We could have just told the student body that we were changing the voting procedure that year and that we were making the final decision. Last minute, but still okay. I could have been a more agreeable person and just been nicer to everyone, and that could have helped us do that. When I finally quit, I should have talked to everyone about it instead of suddenly announcing that I was dropping. Opened a dialogue, helped ease them through the loss of one worker. For the extra turmoil I caused, I am sorry.
But leaving for good was worth it. The shame of breaking a promise was instantly offset by massive relief and the power to get on with my life. I had said that I didn’t have time any more to be an officer. That was true. But I didn’t just gain time back - I had my privacy back, my choice to spend time with people who liked me back, my peace of mind back. I felt safe again.
In this age of hollywood stars coming forth with sexual assault allegations, of women in tech telling stories of horrific workplace harassment, of crime victims of any kind being ostracized for speaking up to people in power - I have sympathy for the people trying to do the right thing. I can only hope that I can make up for my mistakes by doing the same in the future.