Sarah J. Balland: The world goes on changing without the Utah Legislature

Until recently, I worked for the Utah Legislature as a nonpartisan policy analyst in the Office of Legislative Research and General Counsel. I also lost my father to several compounding health issues related to severe alcoholism fairly recently.

Since my father’s passing, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own enablement of his behaviors. I’ve been sitting with myself thinking about codependency and my own identity. Throughout my grief and therapy, I’ve come to realize the role I played in our family system. Rather, I worked through my strong denial of my role in upholding this system, and finally began calling it what it was: an alcoholic family system, borne from intergenerational trauma. It wasn’t just my dad who was responsible.

This stripping away of my denial about my own enablement of unhealthy practices within my family system coincided with the election of Donald Trump, my employment as a legislative staffer, the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing social movements against gross inequities embedded within the systems of the United States of America.

I cannot stop seeing the enablement in which we partake — particularly white folks like myself, no matter your place on the ideological spectrum — to keep this country from being healthy, to keep ourselves from being healthy. I continue to shed my denial like a snakeskin, over and over and over. I have to interrupt this cycle from continuing any further. I have to keep growing and learning, so that old skin — that protective denial — must go. It will take my lifetime.

The Legislature, like all institutions in this country, is having a particularly difficult time shedding its skin. For it to shed its denial would mean opening itself up to truth. And the sad, maddening truth is that the Legislature enables this state’s most unhealthy systems and beliefs to continue.

But the institution cannot admit those truths to itself without fear of an existential crisis, for to admit to those truths would mean that much of what the institution has believed and enabled has been a lie. And the unhealthy institution — like the unhealthy family — is not equipped with effective coping skills to reckon with that.

Voting against critical race theory being taught in schools is not something that a healthy institution does. Continuing to deny that police brutality is a daily occurrence and that environmental racism exists is not healthy. Refusing to pass truly affordable housing or equitable economic development legislation is not healthy. Killing bills that brand racism as a public health crisis and declare the usage of American Indians as mascots to be a racist practice is not healthy.

Many within the institution will say, “But we did this; we did that. You don’t understand. This is politics. You have to be strategic. This is the way it works.”

As someone who worked inside that institution and whose job was to enable it, I can confirm that it most definitely does not work.

I could go on and on, but part of being healthy is also being a good steward of one’s energy. The fact is, if the Legislature won’t shed its denial, then it won’t grow, and it won’t learn, and it won’t change. Thus, it may never be healthy. It might remain stagnant, and eventually fade away or become something unrecognizable. That is the nature of systemic trauma.

The Utah Legislature can continue to languish in its own denial of reality and history, refusing to confront the unhealthy systems it enables. The world will go on shedding its old skin without it.

Sarah J. Balland, Salt Lake City, is a community organizer, independent contractor and freelance policy analyst committed to the dismantling of white supremacy and building a better Utah.