“I run so as not to be perpetually in tabarnak » This sentence, taken from the essay The trenches, by Fanny Britt, I have heard it resonate with so many people over the years. These days it takes a particularly lively form. There are many of them, walking our streets, putting one foot in front of the other, one day after the other, carried by an anger that they have chosen to transform into propulsion.
They walk together, spreading out in our streets and around our schools and establishments like so many surging rivers. Faces, rivers, footsteps, rumbling voices. Anger that spills out and spreads.
This is because anger is a movement. Keeping it inside us inevitably creates turbulence in our bodies. If we prevent it from coming out, anger moves and hits the walls of our bodies. It’s tiring. Cause. These bodies that we see invading our streets are already tense, stretched in acts of flexibility that we ask them to deploy under the weight of an imposed (over)load. A tension that wears, weakens, cracks even the strongest beams.
And through these increasingly numerous cracks (as much in their bodies as in our establishments), the anger finally escaped.
Anger is an agitation that resides within us. It emerges when a situation does not go as we would like. No wonder, then, that so many women and workers share this sentiment. It is enough to have worked a little in the health or education systems, to have been around or used them to witness the extent of the constraints. Systemic rigidities like so many spokes in the wheels of our educational or public health missions.
To keep the wheel turning, the government is calling on the flexibility of the various stakeholders in the sector. However, flexibility in our schools and hospitals is already daily: in the many hours that we extend into personal lives to offer support that we consider essential, in the wallets that we repeatedly untie to compensate for the lack of investment, in the attention and care that we stretch in all directions to meet the growing needs of a number (also growing) of users, and sometimes even even in the bottles that we fill to remedy the absence of drinking water in certain schools. (Yes, you read correctly !)
Flexibility in a body is healthy when it is accompanied by enough strength and control to support it. In other words, our flexibility is only functional if we have control over it. Otherwise the risk of injury increases. A muscle that tears, a sprain, a dislocation.
The problem is that we ask teachers, caregivers and companions to always reach a little further, in all directions… at the same time as we limit their autonomy and refuse to recognize the value and strength of their professionalism (I am thinking, among others, of PL23). It is therefore a real risk of injury for all these people who have, for a long time now, been stretched to the limits of rupture.
It is these bodies, those who walk in our streets, in the cold, in the rain, these bodies, who speak to our children, who hold their hands, who carry boxes of books and furniture to create environments favorable to their well-being, which work despite exhaustion. These bodies which have exceeded their maximum capacity for adaptation.
On the verge of rupture, they chose movement. Unfortunately, the government responds with contempt, repeatedly invalidating and trivializing the value of their efforts, the relevance of their thoughts and the importance of their work.
In a performance society, work is a large part of what defines us. Not recognizing its value is contributing to the complex picture of suffering of the people who practice it.
This trivialization has a price. According to experts in pain neuroscience, suffering linked to a work environment (anxiety, exhaustion, pain, etc.), if contested by a superior, is a concrete way of fueling the problem.
This obstinacy of the government in refusing to recognize what all these voices are demanding is a concrete way of fueling their suffering. Physical, psychological, community. It is, in concrete terms, nourishing the pain that leads to work stoppages, chronic pain, illnesses, early retirements and resignations. Situations which, through the resulting instability, weaken the well-being, health, security… and flexibility of the generation entrusted to them.
They chose the movement. They chose to live in their anger. To honor him. To display it and walk it through our streets, not in a rush of destruction, but in the hope of transforming it. In the name of the education of our children and the health of our population. Transformation which, we know, is necessary, essential. And urgent.