All Things Being Equal

I have watched the movie Lincoln a dozen times or more, now. Forgiving the filmmaker's habit of glossing and smoothing over history to present a coherent narrative thread, it is still a window into a time when the story of equality was still raw and jagged. A time when it was far easier to dismiss those of darker skins to being inferior to the marbled and mottled white of the Founding Fathers.

At one point, Daniel Day-Lewis' President Lincoln relates learning of Euclid's First Axiom: Things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another. It is a jumping off point for the coming vote on the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery, per the story.

Euclid spoke of the "self-evident" nature of his Axioms. They were true because they were true. They were bedrock principles of geometry and mathematics; neither would function without such things as the First Axiom being true. The movie extends the idea that perhaps this could be considered a starting point for that immortal phrase, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are create equal." More importantly, it applies the idea to people, that they are, in fact, all people.

What seems self-evident to modern eyes was not so to 17th, 18th, or 19th Century ones. The movie accurately, but perhaps too softly, portrays the revulsion of White men at the idea they might be considered equivalent to Black men. Opposition to the Thirteenth Amendment was not necessarily because anyone wanted to promote slavery further, or maintain its legality, but due to the idea that millions of freed Black people would demand equality under the law, and White men were not ready to give it to them.

We step one hundred fifty years into the future, and the idea of equality has taken on broader connotations. There is still the Black-White divide, as healthy as ever, written into the very marrow of our society, but now so many other groups are subject to variations on the theme. Hispanic and Latin individuals, members of the LGBTQ community, the disabled... humanity has had equality divvied up and partialed out in microscopic quantities to be fought over by many groups, like a pack of ravenous animals, while the White power structure works feverishly to retain the power to do the divvying and partialing out. The result is the inevitable: White fear of extinction driving us to an administration wholly incapable of running a nation, populated by those who were never capable of doing so in the first place.

If the current situation does nothing more, it should galvanize us into action. We've been deficient in our maintenance of government, and lacking in the moral firmness to drive bigotry, hate, and greed from the halls of Congress and the Oval Office. It's time we stopped assuming that someone will take care of the things necessary to restore order. That was always our responsibility. Many Founding Fathers were skeptical we could do it, but they gave us the power nonetheless. If we were slow to recognize the coming onslaught, we have enough outrage within us to light the fire necessary drive it back. If we take action.

We, who are enjoined to affirm and believe in equality, know the stakes. It is not just the equality of race that must concern us, though this does run through every other area of concern. We must establish equality of Justice. We must establish equality of Income. We must establish Equality of Health. We must establish Equality of Care. We must establish Equality of Education. Most importantly, we must establish Equality of Representation, for all time. It is time for the Constitution to receive proper upgrades, and safeguards, and to retire those parts of it no longer relevant to the modern age of humanity.

This is on us. All of us. But it starts with those of use who carry the same privilege as those who now seek to roll back the clock on American history, to a nonexistent "gilded" age. The easiest way to tear down a system built on White privilege is by White privilege, from the inside. If we are reticent because we are afraid of what we will lose, then we do not understand that we have already lost it. No amount of freedom, liberty, or justice we may hold means anything while it is shared unequally with our fellow citizens of all types. If we do not work to ensure equality in all things, we stand to watch our society tear itself apart as these groups try to wrest from us what we could simply impart by our efforts on their behalf.

It is no longer possible to maintain the current state of affairs. We fight for what we know is right, or as President Lincoln once said, our nation stands to die by suicide.

A Woman's Day Is Never Done

On this day, International Women's Day, we should take a moment to appreciate one salient point: no one would be here save for a woman.

Somewhere along the way, when evolution and natural selection anointed sexual reproduction as the surest pathway to success for mammals, it gave the female of the species the power to continue the species. It placed in her -- what we humans call 'woman' (and in that, let me not denigrate the trans-gendered, for it can be any person with a womb) -- the responsibility of the continued existence of all of us.

Given that the continued existence of our species is tied to that part which holds the power of gestation, it escapes any decent person as to why bearing a womb marks a person for second-class status in our modern society. How can it be that we have not sufficiently shed our Medievalism, so as to see women as true partners and equals, and not simply as assembly lines and incubators? What true righteousness can be claimed by some that they would see a woman held down, subjected to procedures against her will, and forced to retain that which she cannot bear? Does the woman who stands before you bear so little resemblance to the mother who bore you, that you see her as no better than a slave?

What we see now, in America and throughout the world, is a gender slowly wakening from thousands of years of subservience, to greet each new sunrise as free and equal, while others seek to continue to force them back down. A struggle for freedom long building, now fully engaged, is taking place before our eyes, and too many still look away, perhaps embarrassed, perhaps shamed, perhaps intolerant, perhaps willfully ignorant, but all similarly part of it.

This day, save for a mutual declaration, is no different for many a woman, who must work to feed and clothe and house a family, must hold together her family through vicissitudes of life both great and small, must suffer the denigration at the hands of -- and the demonization by -- the men who wield power in the world, and continue to forge ahead in a world filled with obstacles placed to keep her subservient to ways that belong more in the pages of dusty history than in the halls of a modern and  pluralistic society.

Let us then see this day, not as celebration, but re-dedication. Let us work to rip the blinders from the eyes of justice, let us shine pure light on the blessings of liberty, let us seek out and set down those who would turn living, breathing woman into chattel. Let us remember that our human society is predicated on, and owes its existence to, the stalwart strength of those who bear the burden of filling in our future with new life. Let us not see her, our human mother, as below or beneath, but above us, allowing us to bask in her radiance and breathing life into us. Let us stand as one and break the patriarchal fetters that bind her to that existence, and give her leave to weave the tapestry of humanity as she will, without constraint, without dominance. If we are what we say we are, then we have nothing to fear from equality, for it simply the restoration of that which was always true.

Dream Catcher

There are no more words to adequately express the meaning of the life and death of Martin Luther King, Jr., beyond the billions already spoken by far greater luminaries than I. This man, this sweet, kind, gentle, fiery soul, has been at once enlarged and mitigated by the run of years from his heyday. A holiday bears his name, America's soul bears witness to his touch, but American society has not quite caught up with his dream. That a black man sits in the highest office in the land is not an accomplishment, but a step, one plodding footfall toward a higher and holier world that this black Southern preacher saw from his vantage point on the mountain top.

While he may continue to be lauded -- or reviled -- even to this day, it is not the man but his dream that should interest us more, for his revelation to us of his vision, a day when no person would be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, was just that: a dream. It was not a fully-formed thing sprung deep from within the recesses of a man's heart and soul, but a tapestry of the wishes and hopes and prayers of millions, woven into a transformative vision by this man's conviction and his belief in God. It was a thing built of the words and actions and history of the people around him, absorbed by every touch of a hand or every earnest conversation or every horrific scene of racial intolerance. The man took those skeins of human misery and hope and knit them into panoramic tableau, then shared it with us all, and we recognized ourselves in it even as his words spilled into the air.

It might be too much to ask that everyone who has heard his words has been so moved as to be changed at heart. In the pits of some, the darkness is too deep, and even the stirring words of a Martin Luther King, Jr. bring scant illumination. Many of us, however, have been transformed. We seek that world he showed us, a world where our humanity counts for more than the skin we were born with, the faith we were raised with, the gender we follow, or any of the myriad differences we impose on others. Having caught the dream is not the same as creating it, though; the vision outstrips reality, where no matter how delightful and empowering and righteous it seems, not all share our enthusiasm for its establishment.

On this day, let us remember the man who placed the hope for a more peaceful and just world at our feet, by doing what is necessary to pick up that hope, make it our own, and carry it forward. Though the man is no longer here to help carry the burden, may his spirit enrich us and help us to shoulder the load.

Life, Humanity, And Everything

The crowd that assembles under the umbrella of the "right-to-life" movement is extremely concerned with potential, soul-bearing life that resides in a woman's womb, to the extent of trying their best to strip a woman of her right to exercise the course of her pregnancy as she sees fit. Once the child is born of woman, feeling the Sun upon its skin, and filling its lung with air, it is no longer of as much consequence to them. That the child is born into poverty, to a mother who must subsist on public assistance and the kindness of strangers, or, worse, who looks at the child as a reminder of youthful indiscretion or brutal violation, does not seem to bother them that much.

In fact, when it comes to the fully-formed human, as child or adult, much is made to try and minimize the glory that is humanity. A human being is reduced from an instrument of God's crafting, master of Earth and its environs, to an inconvenience or nuisance or "one of them." Rather than accept the fact that all humans are of common stock, related in the greatest detail, many seek to categorize and minimize their fellow humans, to salve their sense of inferiority, or to enforce their sense of domination. That so many of us treat our brethren as the sum of their tags and categorizations and attributes, is a sign that we have not evolved far past our primitive ancestors.

One only has to look at the rhetoric flying about, to see it first-hand. The vitriol of some toward illegal immigrants, reducing them to nothing more than common, law-breaking curs. The "righteous" anger of some over abortion, treating the unborn fetus as sacred, while treating the frightened and confused mother as some sort of God-forsaken heathen, bent on the destruction of humanity. The fervent anger and thinly-couched slurs of some "patriots," aimed toward the President, over his attempts to rectify ills and provide security for all Americans. The invective of some brought out by the debate of health care reform, treating those without insurance or with preexisting conditions as if they deserve their fate.

Discourse in this country is a mockery, a shouting match engaged in by all comers, as if tearing each other down can possibly lead to the solution of the serious problems facing this country and the world. It is not simply the ignorant and boorish who are so engaged, but their detractors find it as easy to slap them with degrading and offensive appellations, as if compounding the problem somehow scores intellectual points in the debate. Where great oratory is called for, there is only mud-slinging, name-calling, and obstinacy.

When we look at another person, we cannot afford the luxury of seeing them for their surface attributes, for like an iceberg, who a person is is mainly hidden beneath. Clothing, make-up, jewelry, religious effects... these are all camouflage, a facade to hide behind, a barrier to protect our innermost workings, a wall to prevent others from seeing us as we truly are. We must learn to strip away the surface of those we meet, to delve into the depths, and to avoid the continued trap of judging the book by its cover. Only in this, can we even begin to being about true and universal peace and equality. For inequity exists only as long as we maintain the fiction that people are what they appear to be. There are times, when actions do not even tell us all there is to know, for sometimes people take actions based on forces propelling them from the depths of their soul, in ways we cannot fundamentally imagine.

No amount of age, intellect, breeding, or wealth obviates the fact that each of us, as individuals, has value as a living, breathing being, and that while we are different in many ways, we are the same in more ways than we know. Equality is the base measure of humanity, and our deviation from it is only brought about by our instinct to divide the world, and everything in it, into convenient categories. A survival instinct honed by millions of years of evolution now threatens to destroy our ascendancy; for humanity to survive and flourish, we must force our evolution on an intellectual level, harnessing our mental energies to turning aside instinct, and bringing humanity back to its level, that peace and harmony might reign.