Better Strategies for Equality
Posted on 04 May 2018
Equal consideration of all humanity is necessary for the creating of a sustainable peace, a peace where we can all live fulfilling lives with some measure of contentment. How we endeavour to establish equality says much about our culture. It is also an indicator of how successful we are going to be (or not) in our efforts.
The strategy most visibly used to help give the under-privileged access to the higher levels of our society is to train people in how to be like those in power. We are to give up those things that signify we are part of a lower class. We are to take up the values, aspirations, and culture of the powerful. Women are taught to be ruthless. Non-white people are learning to be cut-throat entrepreneurs.
Maybe this is creating a sort of equality across various types of human being. However, what it is really doing is affirming the believed importance of a broken culture which created this inequality in the first place, one in which the odds will always be stacked in favour of those already in power. If we even managed to overcome things such as racism, sexism, ableism, and the like within this rubric, we would be doing so while entrenching classism.
We have a dominant culture that has not only taken over the world, it is destroying it. Why are all of us who are subject to this system propping it up? We should be burning our black business suits; tearing down the sterile work places and factories; walking away from our TVs, radios, and the like and making our own stories, music,and cultural expression. We must reclaim all that is kind and beautiful and unique about ourselves, holding these things up as critical to our well-being and our very existence.
The dominators have been reducing our lives to where life is about power and cogs: are you powerful or are you a cog? Anything that does not fit into either of those boxes has been subject to a cruel and short-sighted winnowing. Our world is dying because we have lost a sense of community with all that is living. You cannot sense continuity when you are turning others into cogs in order to gain power. There is no equality in that.
Find yourself. Reclaim yourself. And in so doing save the world.
In peace,
Katherine
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