Too Big to Be Accountable
The organization is too large to be sorry,
the organization is too large for the story
of the individual wrong to register.
The organization is too large and the minister
of the department that committed
the act is gone and what’s transmitted
up the chain is a processed version of
the complaint that sounds very different from
what you experienced in the actual event,
what you experienced in the moment and the spent
hours of your life in the aftermath,
what you experienced as you tried to map
your experience onto the institution’s form.
What you experienced didn’t conform
to the form’s categories and so the form
processed your experience into the norm
that the institution’s complaint process tracks.
The form processed your experience into the wax
of the institution’s language, and what came out
was something that doesn’t bear about
any resemblance to what you came in with.
Something institutional, and the myth
of the process being there for you is complete.
Too big to be accountable, too big to be sorry,
too big to be accountable, too big for the story
of what happened to you to reach the level where
someone who could change it breathes the air
of decision. Too big to be accountable,
too big to be accountable and it’s mountable
evidence but there’s nobody to mount it to.
Too big to be accountable and the view
from inside the institution looking out
is a sea of individual people and their doubt
that anything they say will change the working.
Too big to be accountable, the shirking
is systemic, it’s the architecture.
Too big to be accountable, the lecture
about the process is the process, that’s the thing.
Too big to be accountable, let the bell ring.
I filed the thing that gave me a case number,
I filed the thing and got the slumber
party invitation of the institutional response.
I filed the thing and got the response
that said it would be reviewed in forty-five days.
I filed the thing and got forty-five days of haze,
and then a letter saying it was outside
the scope of what they could address inside
the current review period. File again.
File again, the institution said, and then
I would receive an acknowledgment of the new
filing within thirty days, which I knew
would come, because the acknowledgment comes,
the acknowledgment always comes, the hums
of the institutional machinery are always there.
The acknowledgment is always in the air.
The accountability is never in the air.
The accountability has no address anywhere
inside the institution’s physical address.
The accountability lives somewhere in the process
map that doesn’t exist and was never drawn.
The accountability is the lawn
of the institution that nobody mows.
The accountability is where nobody goes.
The anger here is not about this one institution,
the anger here is not about the one solution
that failed. It’s about the pattern of the size
of things as a defense against the eyes
of people who were wronged by them, the scale
as the mechanism by which things get stale
before they’re resolved, by which the individual
goes from energized and ready to the ritual
exhaustion of the process, by which the man
who had the original complaint ran
into the machinery and lost his case,
not because he was wrong but because the space
between his reality and the institution’s intake
is the size of the ocean and he couldn’t make
the crossing before the deadline closed the port.
The anger here is about the kind of court
that’s too big to be wrong and too big to be right,
too big to be accountable for the fight.
The person who was wrong that day
has moved on, has a different job, a different bay
of the institution or outside it entirely.
The person who behaved unwisely
toward me is not here and was not here
when I filed the thing and is not near
any of the mechanism that processed
my complaint. The person rested
from the accountability the moment they moved on.
The institution absorbed it, and the gone
is all that’s left where the accountability should be.
The institution is too big for them and too big for me.