For https://steemit.com/hive-161155/@mariannewest/day-844-5-minute-freewrite-tuesday-prompt-revolution
You want a revolution? I want a revelation, now listen to my declaration. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Sure, but when I meet Thomas Jefferson, I’ll convince him to include women in the sequel. Work!
I know. Hamilton, right?
Let’s talk, for some time, about what it means to believe that all humans are created equal. I think this is one of the most important statements we can believe, and if we can bring ourselves to truly believe it, we will, indeed, have a healthy, happy, productive society within our reach.
There are a couple ways it’s truly relevant. One is borders.
Now, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’ll concede one point. If a group of people decide, “we want to be able to walk around nude in our community” and another group of people want to say “we don’t want to let people walk around nude in our community”, it seems reasonable that they’d agree on some sort of border to divide their communities, so that you know what the people around you have agreed is acceptable behavior.
But if someone agrees to abide by the rules of your community, that border should be open to them.
And so we come to this thought: if we truly believe that all human beings are born equal, why in the world do we make decisions about where they’re allowed to go based on where they were born? If someone is born 50 miles south of the US/Mexico border to Mexican parents, there’s an incredibly difficult process with no guarantee of success for them to be legally allowed to live a short car ride away from where they were born.
Why? Why is that ok?
So often, the argument comes that “they’re taking out jobs” or “they’re using our resources”, and
First and foremost, that’s statistically inaccurate, but
More importantly, so?
If they were, why don’t they have the same right to access the resources of the world as you do? Just because they were born elsewhere?
It baffles me.
Imagine you grew up in the United States, and your parents owned their home and you went to the doctor and ate healthy foods, and you never had to worry about where the money was coming from, because you were a kid, and there was always enough.
Now, as an adult, imagine that you learned that the money came from some stocks your folks owned that paid nice dividends. Utility stocks, lets imagine. Your parents were not particularly wealthy, but over the past 50 years, they’d been investing in safe-ish places, and could give you a modest stipend as you pursued whatever.
Now, this is a nice little dream… and it’s true for some people. But, in this story, you didn’t do anything to “earn” this. And, to some extent, your parents didn’t either. They earned some of their money, but this stipend comes from investments that went up, and not down… but those investments are not “making money” the people who work for the utility companies are producing something of value, and their wages are diminished because they company is paying a dividend.
But I’m certainly not mad at your parents for making the best of a broken system. The real question is,
Why doesn’t everyone get that? It’s nice. You’re not going to say no to it. Is it because everyone CAN’T? Ok, but if you didn’t get it, would that mean things would be better for some other folks?
I’d say yes. And we all deserve some basics.
Folks are dying in the streets, and you are getting a couple thousand dollars a month because someone working at a power plant is doing a very good job for a modest amount of pay.
I’m not really mad at your parents. I’m mad at the folks making billions and billions. But the folks who are in the middle are content with the system that allows the billions and billions because it’s not too terrible for them.
A system that’s terrible for anyone
Is
Terrible.
.
.
.