The role of infighting in maintaining scarcity, hierarchies, and exclusion

This piece is unfinished, but it feels necessary. I am still learning how to move through anger toward something that might resemble repair or solidarity. I am not writing a strategy or a manifesto; I am writing what I see, what keeps happening, and how it feels to live inside it. The truth, when spoken plainly, seldom flatters anyone—but it is the only place from which anything honest can begin.

I am supposed to believe that advocates always have my children’s best interests at heart, that teachers are neglectful, administrators the enemy, and that other parents are self-serving, bigoted, or naive. I am told that unions only protect teachers, governments fund inclusion, and yet inclusion remains elusive—a horizon that recedes the closer we approach.

Just a Parent

I have sat across from educators who were desperate to help—people who cared deeply about my children but were punished by systems that reward compliance over compassion. They were advocates too, bound by the same scarcity logic that kept me begging for support. The illusion of opposition protects the institution itself, not the people within it.

I am furious at the machine that convinces parents, teachers, and administrators that our suffering is separate. It thrives on division, feeding on the exhaustion of those it isolates. When families turn on teachers and teachers turn on families, the architecture of scarcity stays intact. The fight becomes horizontal instead of upward, every act of conflict absorbed back into the system as proof of its necessity. Anger redirected sideways keeps the machinery stable. Frustration that never reaches its architects becomes fuel. The province continues to herald its historic investments in education while our children endure.

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The seduction of small battles

Inside schools, the ideals of disability justice and privacy should protect dignity and consent, yet they are often used to manage risk and silence critique. When a parent raises a safety concern, the conversation shifts toward tone. When a teacher describes burnout, someone warns that it could damage the school’s reputation or breach professional loyalty. Administrators invoke privacy law to shut down dialogue. The vocabulary of care becomes a vocabulary of control.

We all fear personal ruin. That children might be hurt. We all fear.

This pattern leaves everyone alone. A teacher with an unsafe class learns to stop asking for help. A parent with evidence of neglect is told to reframe it as misunderstanding. The appearance of calm replaces the pursuit of safety. Harm continues, hidden behind professional decorum.

It is easy to fight locally because the wound is visible. The teacher who fails to protect a child, the parent who celebrates inclusion week while another’s child hides in the hall—these conflicts feel personal and irreconcilable. Yet the system depends on this closeness. It mirrors our pain back at us until we lose sight of the architects. Each feud protects the hierarchy above it.

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The rewriting of truth

Every institution depends on narrative control. Inside schools, truth is filtered through caution and self-preservation. Staff are told that full honesty might expose liability. Families are told that naming trauma could endanger relationships. Advocates are told that demanding accountability risks access to future support. The lesson is constant: speak carefully or lose your place at the table.

When my little girl told her teacher that a boy kept touching her and she wanted him to stop, she was told to try to be understanding. His disability was offered as the reason her boundaries mattered less. My daughter is disabled too, and she needed safety as much as anyone else, yet the label of disability was used as an excuse for harm instead of a call for support. No one would name the real cause: there were not enough adults in the room. The ratios were impossible. The school called this scarcity inclusion. The silence around staffing was treated as professionalism, as though acknowledging the shortage would threaten the illusion of success. That moment taught me everything: empathy had become a demand placed on those who were already harmed, a rule that required my daughter to be kind while she was being hurt, and me to be calm while she was being failed.

In this environment, children become symbols of virtue and proof of policy. Their distress is translated into behavioural data. Their absence becomes resilience. Their suffering is reinterpreted as progress. Each layer of reporting transforms lived pain into administrative order.

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The violence of good intentions

Everyone I met inside education wanted to believe they were doing the right thing.

Inclusion without support is a trap.

It creates the illusion of equality while ensuring that disabled children and those who teach them remain in crisis. The teacher who clears a room to protect classmates, the parent who pushes a child through the door because attendance is moral duty—each acts inside a false economy of virtue. Inclusion promises belonging, but without resources it becomes institutionalised cruelty. Exhaustion is repackaged as dedication, collapse as care.

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The broken architecture

Most of us are doing our best inside a structure that defines success as endurance. Harm arises not from cruelty but from design. Every new policy is poured over old cracks; the surface smooths, the fracture remains. Performance matters more than repair. Administrators are rewarded for stability, teachers for coping, parents for gratitude. The system survives because we keep mistaking survival for progress.

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Shared exhaustion

A teacher crying in a parked car, a parent rehearsing calm before a meeting, an administrator marking time between crises—each believes their suffering is singular. The system ensures it feels that way. Solidarity would reveal that austerity breaks everyone differently but with the same intent: to keep exhaustion private. When we understand that fatigue as collective rather than personal, loyalty loses its moral shine. What once looked like commitment begins to look like unpaid labour in service of an illusion.

Healing begins when we refuse to see one another as enemies.

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The cost of endurance

I am no longer proud of how hard I pushed my children to attend school. I believed persistence would prove our worth. I thought that showing up would invite fairness. Instead, compliance became proof that everything was fine. Inclusion without support turns attendance into evidence of health, masking collapse as success. Each generation refines the same endurance, mistaking discipline for hope. Every time we endured silently, we helped the system call harm progress.

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Anger and moral injury

I have been angry in ways that frightened me—anger so intense it felt engineered. The system depends on this combustion. It lights us from within so that our fury burns us up before it ever reaches the legislature. It turns grief into spectacle and exhaustion into containment, ensuring that no flame joins another. This is the hidden violence of public systems: they provoke the rage they need to survive.

Anger is evidence of care. It names moral injury before language catches up. The challenge is to keep it alive without letting it devour us. Niceness and lies keep us divided; they polish the surface while rot spreads beneath. Real solidarity begins when anger is shared truthfully—without gossip, without performance, without shame. Anger held collectively becomes power; anger denied becomes ash.

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Collective complicity and humility

We are all implicated. Parents, teachers, and administrators act within an economy that rewards appearance over care. Admitting this does not absolve anyone—it clarifies responsibility. Repair begins when we stop pretending our righteousness protects us from participation in harm.

Humility demands practice: acknowledging where we caused injury, listening without defence, agreeing on remedies, and redistributing power and resources. Shared governance, transparent data, restorative processes, and sustained advocacy for staffing and training make inclusion real.

Humility is political. It dissolves the false divide between critic and ally and reframes accountability as collective work. Courage includes owning failure. Solidarity begins where denial ends.

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Clarity after guilt

Guilt fades when betrayal is recognised as structural rather than personal. My children were harmed, teachers suffered, and meaning well was never enough. The real betrayal lies in a design that calls itself inclusive while starving inclusion of what makes it possible. The system feeds on division, exhaustion, and misplaced faith in endurance. What remains true is this: endurance feels like virtue, compliance masquerades as peace, and inclusion without support is abandonment by another name.