I'm also trying to put stuff together for her Medicaid/Medicare and my work and the classes I take. Oy.
So while I work, here's a post I had to write for one of my grad classes dealing with questionsof inequality.
Rosary
The
problems of inequality and justice are too broad, too vast, and too complicated
for a mere three hundred words, but the readings and media we were assigned
this week make me feel angry, frustrated, depressed, and often impotent. Then
again I also identify as a proud feminist with Marxist leanings.
The
media referenced this week makes me angry because these have been the arguments
of my entire lifetime. I was born in 1965 a time of turbulence and optimism.
What angers me is that now in 2015 when I will be fifty years old, we seem not
to have moved forwards, but to in fact have regressed. Income disparity is at
level not seen for a hundred years or so; racism still permeates our culture
and discourse as does the violence it calls up; and women’s bodies are still a battleground.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
designed to promote and safeguard the civil rights of all was basically gutted
by the Supreme Court in 2013 when they ruled states no longer needed federal
approval before changing state laws that affected voting. Yet, we constantly
hear of voter fraud and polling place bullying, but the law is now fairly
unenforceable. We also have now so many Voter ID rules that we have basically
reinstituted a poll tax. This makes me angry.
In 1973, Roe vs. Wade was decided,
I was eight. The majority of my lifetime has seen the abortion issue debated
and thrown around. This, too, makes me angry. What makes me even angrier are
all of the recent attempts by legislators to limit, to repeal, and to control
women’s reproductive rights. This makes me angry.
When my father died before my third
birthday, my newly single mother raised me, and we lived on Social Security
survivor’s benefits. I know what it is like to be part of the “welfare state.”
When I hear people say things about how the poor don’t work hard enough, how
they have opportunities if they only took them, I become angry. When I hear
people condemn fast food workers for striking to have a livable wage, or when I
hear the trickle-down economics blather, I become angry. I become angry because
I watch my students who try to raise their children on these minimum wage jobs
struggle to have an education which might lead them to opportunities that they
can barely imagine because our nation, if not our world, has limited their
dreams to what is appropriate to their income, their race, or their gender. I
grow angry.
Unlike the Incredible Hulk,
however, I cannot let people not like me when I am angry. Anger motivates but
it does not solve. What does solve? Well, Emma Watson’s speech before the UN
shows us one way—to talk to each other, to discuss these issues. Openly
discussing these issues is uncomfortable; these discussions make people wiggle
and avoid committing, but we must have them. When we see each other as people
first and not as income, race, or gender, we can then begin to find the answers
the solutions.
Obviously as an educator, I believe
educating people on these issues is important. As we learn from our past how we
have treated each other, how people have felt about that treatment, we can
learn then to respect each other. In respecting each other no matter income,
gender, or race, we can begin to see the solution.
I do not have a solution. This is a
problem bigger than me, but I am at heart a Utilitarian: That which is good is
that which does the most good for the greatest amount of people. All people,
not just one or two groups, all. Until we can see, accept, respect, and talk
with one another equally, I will remain angry—an angry liberal feminist with
Marxist leanings, who wants to see and to work for a forward movement on these
issues in the next fifty years of life.
No comments:
Post a Comment