Poor, poor, misunderstood Liz Cady. The person who courted controversy with her dog whistles about critical race theory and Black Lives Matter and, lest we forget, brought disgrace on her community by comparing BLM to Nazism, has up and quit. She resigned from the school board after little more than a year in office.

What a trooper.

Of course, it’s pretty much S.O.P. for right-wing culture warriors to screech at the slightest criticism while liberally defaming anyone else. How many January 6 insurrectionists have folded quietly in the face of 45 days in jail or some such? Pretty much all of ’em.

Let’s set aside the offensiveness that Cady tries to erase from her tenure, just for a moment, and simply say this: Democracy is hard. If you want to reform a public body, you’d best be willing to get in the trenches and be prepared for a long battle with an uncertain endpoint. Especially if the others on the body don’t share your views.

Even more so when a slate of like-minded candidates went down to defeat in this spring’s election. Sorry to say it, but the voters have spoken and Cady’s viewpoint did not carry the day. That doesn’t doom her cause to defeat, but it is a definite setback and it made her task that much more difficult. Difficult enough that she turned tail and ran.

And tried to frame herself as martyr and victim in the process. Pathetic.

In her resignation message, Cady wrote that all she wanted to do was “make the board more accessible and approachable to those who have concerns and criticisms.” What she really wanted was for the board to capitulate to her point of view on CRT and BLM and anything else she associated with those two abbreviations. They didn’t do that, so in Cady’s mind they are unapproachable. In fact, I’ve always found that publicly elected bodies are usually too sensitive to criticism from small, highly-motivated groups.

She whined on: “Board leadership has spent a wasteful amount of time admonishing me for doing exactly what this board does not: engage in two-way dialogue with the public.”

Noooo, the board admonished you for wasting its time, fomenting groundless controversy, and making statements that, again, brought disgrace on your community.

Last June, the school board adopted an equity policy. Cady cast the only “No” vote. In her mind, that meant her colleagues were closed to her viewpoint. What it really meant was that Cady’s work had only begun. If she wanted to change all those minds, she had to convince them to change. Failing that, she had to build a movement among voters to enact change by electing her allies.

This spring, that didn’t happen. The three candidates openly supported by the Essex Republicans got whomped at the polls. Cady remained a one-person minority. She lost.

She could have girded her loins and joined battle. Instead, she sounded retreat.

Good riddance.