The drop-off everyone complains about

Every morning outside a primary school in Jeddah, cars stop in the road, children step out between the traffic, and somebody's horn goes on longer than it should.

At the gate, the parents talk about it. Somebody will get hurt. The school should do something. The municipality should paint a line, put up a sign, send someone.

Almost none of them say it to anyone who could change it.

It is not that they do not care. They care a great deal. It is that each of them has quietly decided this is not theirs to fix. They are only parents, after all. They do not run the school or the roads.

That belief is more comfortable than the truth, which is that they hold a surprising amount of power. Forty names on one letter to the head teacher is hard to ignore. A handful of families agreeing to park a street away and walk the last minute changes the road by the next morning. One parent who refuses, every day, to stop in the traffic gives everyone behind her permission to do the same.

None of this needs a title or anyone's approval. All of it was available yesterday.

Underestimating our own power feels like modesty. Mostly it is relief. If nothing can be done, nothing is asked of us, and we can go on complaining at the gate with a clear conscience.

That relief is on loan. It lasts until the morning something happens, and after that everyone will know exactly how much they could have done.