This is what I love about this place. I'm usually too wrapped up in my own world to really notice how such agendas are playing out in the real one. The most recent thing I saw that compares was which ever Chapelle special talked about the alphabet people, referring to the LGBTQ (I think), which I pretty much decided to chuckle through and stay out of but this feels like a prompt to form a better understanding.

This is also rather difficult for me to work through. I do want equality... or at least I thought I did, but after reading this, I think I've been confusing equality with a level playing field. I'm not really sure how to reconcile that. I do think that society needs a bottom that one can't fall beneath, otherwise it seems we waste resources combatting the infections that arise from a poorly maintained body.

This is a lot to think about. I often try to think of things in terms of the cycles of nature in larger and larger scale. When you're zoomed in it appears everything is just eating everything else, but when you step back far enough it's all one big symphony of life.

So that brings me to this. Everything is eating everything because that's how energy is transferred to play the song. So maybe we can do better. Maybe we can get our energy directly from the sun or wind, and maybe we can all work together to achieve that instead of settling for eating each other.

And what about the song. Do we have any influence over it or are we puppets that dance across the keys and strings by the will of something else? If we can influence it should we? If the song of a cricket isn't the sound a potential mate wants to hear the extension of life that is that cricket comes to an end. Are we singing the song that works or the one that leaves us to die alone?

I don't really know what to make of these thoughts yet so I'm going to stop here. I'd like to hear everyone's thoughts, though, if I'm not just rambling nonsense.

Edit to add: My apologies that this is all random and out of order, but if I waited until I got everything packaged neatly like you I'd end up just sitting around jerking it all day, and that can likely be taken literally as much as metaphorically, believe me, you. But I digress...

I have thoughts on the concept of privilege in general terms.

I half-assed a post about it some time ago that I won't recap here, but the short of it was I think I've been on the receiving end of white privilege. I had enough encounters with law enforcement in my younger years that I could have landed in a hard spot. I believe there are people of color out there who landed in worse spots for less. I've also spent the last several years delving into history and I think there's ample evidence to support the claim that there's a systematic caste system in our society.

This is where things get a little tricky for me. I believe the racism, sexism, and all the other -isms are really just extensions of classism, but that doesn't dismiss the perpetration of the individual -isms. There are racist and sexists and they do discriminate.

So, I guess this breaks down as above. The black kid and white kid don't inherently deserve equality in life, as that relates to skills, abilities, and personalities which are unique to everyone, but they do deserve a level playing field, in that neither should be over or under penalized simply because of something like color or culture.

This is a thin hair for me to split, so I hope I'm not droning on..., but,
getting back to history, that hasn't been the case on an institutional level.

So now that this is a reality, it opens doors for the opportunists I believe you're talking about above. They see something they can exploit and they take an idea, which in it's pure form is honorable, but twist it so that it functions in opposition to it's purpose.

It's the same thing we see with almost everything. Humanity invents a tool and someone weaponizes it. So, I guess my conclusion is I'm glad to be in a place that still tries to keep our tools in our hands instead of at our throats. :D