Inequality/Injustice

Inequality/injustice can take on many forms, impact different people in unrelated ways, it doesn’t care if you know any better or what country you live in. It exists simply because we as a species have allowed it. Nothing more, nothing less. It has been around since our time began, from the height of Rome and Egypt, Vikings and Crusades to the current caste system that regulates how government and countries are run. I feel confident in saying that at no time during our evolution on this world did we exist as ‘one’. This is not uniquely our own though, this need to quantify and qualify our society is found in the animal kingdom as well...the difference is that only the humans as a species thrives at the control and suffocating oppression of others. Our species designates importance based on many things; gender, fitness, size, color, culture, religion, education, profession, socioeconomic status, household makeup...the list goes on and is by no means exhaustive as I have laid it out here. 

I could write a book, actually several books on each and every type of inequality/injustice there is in our society. But in all honesty, I am not well enough educated on the various schools of thought nor do I have a working understanding of each...I just simply do not fundamentally understand why we are, the way we are. Even when the way we are, hurts others. It would be a disservice for me to try and generalize with a broad brush when to do this the right way, I would need a tiny brush capable of the most minut strokes to do right by every sense of the word. So I’m going to try and focus my thoughts to a smaller subsection of society, one I belong to. Well, actually it’s more like four...just hear me out.

In my religion, women are supposed to be subservient and do as the men say. Women are not allowed the same rights, functions or designations as the men. In my religion, those not heterosexual have even less rights, functions and designations than even the women. In my religion those not married and sealed in the temple are viewed slightly better than being non heterosexual but still not as good as men in general. So basically, no matter what or who you are if you are not a heterosexual man...you plummet down the list of importance. If I take who I am without other qualities and stack them up, I’ve already struck out. I’m a woman, who is queer, not married in the temple and single. 

The kicker is that I didn’t set out to talk about the religious aspects of inequality/injustice within my religion...I actually wanted to address the impact it has on those with mental illness and/or substance abuse. Because I identify more with that population than those of my own faith. Every day I watch it in action, the haves and have nots. The well to do and the homeless and destitute. The worthy and the undesirables. It’s played out everyday before my eyes, the song may change but the dance is always the same. 

The narrative goes something like this...the only time people pay attention to the mentally ill are when there’s a disaster or tragedy of some sort, and even then the view point is slanted and negative. People cross the street to get away from them, walk around or over them, maybe spare a few bits of change when they see them at stop signs asking for help. Still other people view them as ‘lowlifes’ or ‘people who can just get up and get a job but they’re lazy and on welfare.’ I don’t think people really understand that mental illness isn’t something you can just get up from, move past or ignore. After all, we praise the people who are strong, even if they lie. But villainize the weak when they are being honest. As for the homeless...the vast majority of Americans are just one paycheck from walking the streets. We are not so different, in fact, more similar than you would ever understand. The mere fact that many of us have to decide between our medications or paying rent speaks louder than a million screaming voices. 

I don’t know why we have to feel the need to designate our differences, I mean they are what make us stronger and more complete. Can you imagine how boring life would be if we were all the same? Yet at the same time I understand that labels are how we understand our world, at least in the pharmaceutical world anyway...without a diagnosis (label) you can’t get services or medications. It’s a sad business I’m part of, a broken system serving broken people in a broken world. The enormity of what it would take to fix this life is overwhelming and leaves me mentally exhausted and feeling helpless. We would have to flip the entire script of everything we have ever known. Money would need to be spent on preventative care, we would need to invest in each other, we would need to fund programs without the empirical data that we currently use to judge the effectiveness of worth. We would change the funding structure, the governmental process by which decisions are made based on fear and history...only to be more mindful and future oriented. 

I don’t think we could do it. We hold so tightly to our current ideals that the idea to publicly fund all communities, to provide free healthcare, to make free meals in school, to provide for each other starting at birth to set people up for better outcomes, frankly terrifies. We would have to start at the bottom and work our way up, instead of from the top down to the bottom. We would need to divert funds from the military to health, education and social services...all that currently hover around the last to get funding. We would in essence need to change our entire value system. This problem feels too big to deal with, I mean how do you change something so ingrained into the fabric of our country? 

Well, for starters we could admit that mistakes have been made. We can admit that we aren’t all that and a bag of chips. We could humble ourselves and ask other countries what they have done and learn from them, for better or worse. We could make ourselves a priority instead of the government deciding who gets what. There’s a lot of things we could and would need to do, but nothing changes until we admit that there’s something wrong. Until that happens, we are doomed to continue to repeat the mistakes we make. Both on an individual level and societal level. The thing about inequality/injustice is, it’s everywhere but only if you choose to see it. Therein lies the rub, because a lot of people don’t want to believe that it exists. As if the understanding of such a deeply rooted issue will blind them and destroy the dreams they hold most dear. Problem is that burying your head in the sand can only work for so long, before it pulls you down and engulfs you. It would be easy to surrender at this point, after the life you thought was real burns but that’s when you rise, take a stand and move forward creating the change that pulls you from ignorance to informedness.