When Facebook decides your response is too long, just Tumblr.
This jumps all over the place because it was a point by point response to a comment. Without the context, it’s pretty useless.
Left…right…the false dichotomies are endless. Polarizing and politicizing, dividing and conquering…keeping half of us fully engaged in constant pseudo-intellectual/pseudo-moral/pseudo-cultural/pseudo-political battle with the other half of us. There is no us in the US. We place the dollar above all else, followed closely by competition and privilege. We feed division, elitism, and power over. Simply put, we are fucking disgusting human beings and it is woven into the very fabric of our society. We live to destroy people to make ourselves feel better, stronger, richer, freer…
Oppression is in the eye of the beholder, but not in the way you have presented it. If one has not experienced systemic oppression, one may behold that it does not exist. I hate to pull the “white, heteronormative, male privilege” card because it often comes off as an attack born of ad hominem, but it doesn’t make it any less real. It is incredibly difficult to see oppression that one does not feel. It is very easy to minimize the battles that one does not have to fight.
Marilyn Frye describes oppression as: “Oppression is a system of interrelated barriers and forces which reduce, immobilize and mold people who belong to a certain group, and effect their subordination to another group (individually to individuals of the other group, and as a group, to that group).” She goes on to explain the difficulty in recognizing oppression with the analogy of a caged bird: “If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere … It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment.”
It’s not entirely true that human civilization has never been better in all of human history. Many battles have been fought and won, which is true, however those wins are not truly permanent gains. The transient nature of some of that progress is very much a secondary point. In the United States, many struggles have become harder and even more barriers to success have been put in place. Instead of the overt, political oppression, we have turned to a covert, rigged game. At one point, anyone (meaning exclusively white men) could have access to their version of the American Dream with dedication and hard work. These things are simply no longer enough. We require arbitrary credentials and it takes money to make money in the world of innovation. We set arbitrary standards, putting faith in college degrees that will never compete with the school of life in a number of fields. We shun the erudite and seek out only those who have been groomed by our educational institutions - where we are most frequently taught curriculum that adheres to a master narrative and corporate agenda, often dissuading true critical thinking. I’m not saying that formal training in fields that require it is a farce, but that academia has been bought and sold. We require secretaries to have bachelor’s degrees, though I’ve seen no evidence that such an education improves their ability in that arena. There have been some gains in equality and they are important, but that does not mean that we are all treated as equals in this society. We’ve still such a very long way to go and honestly, the powers that be are still fighting to undo those gains. Our mentality has not changed. We blame victims and praise bullies. We encourage the most despicable elements of human nature at the expense of virtue and compassion. Just because it looks better on paper, does not mean that things are all good in the U.S. of A. I strongly raise that it is simply not good enough.
From where you sit, it may appear that human suffering has improved so profoundly. All day long, I see the profound damage that our society and our culture does to human beings…and all day long, I try to figure out how we could ever possibly make it better for the generations to follow. And thank god the generations that are following us are waking up to our failings.
I don’t need data or media narratives to show me the reality of our situation. I abhor the media in ways that I cannot begin to convey - with their bullshit sensationalism and their perpetuation of the master narrative; a contrived and prepackaged, altered version of reality. I see human suffering every day, created and maintained by systemic oppression and corporate dollars, ignored by the uninitiated and the privileged. My education and my data, my narrative, is in life and in people. And I watch the rat race of the others, day in and day out…people who think that all that exists here are first world problems and that we’ve been all dealt the same hand in life…when so very many people haven’t even been taught how to play the game. Reality does not point to favorable indicators of human well-being. The reality of the number of people diagnosed as “mentally ill”, our serious problem with drug addiction, and number of people in prison should paint a clear enough picture. And guess what! Those things have absolutely no sign of getting anything but worse anytime soon. We maintain that pathologizing and dysfunction simply to set people further back. We call them weak. We pretend we are somehow better or more important. We call them “them” and we become “us”. And we blame them for their lack of character instead of blaming the system, society, and culture that shaped them.
I would choose the 60’s-70’s…when people had passion and fight to make a fucking difference, rather than stick their heads in the sand like ostrich-sheep hybrids…when people were aware of the problems we had and willing to embrace progress…before America went to fucking sleep. Perhaps the struggles were harder, but there were battles fought and won. People were awake for a time.
Solving our problems is quite simple. We are human beings and deserve to be treated like human beings. No one person should ever have more value than any other person. Our children need to be educated on emotional intelligence and the importance of community, compassion, and equality. We have so very many of the answers, but we ignore them in favor of the master narrative and the “American way”.
There is plenty of opportunity for YOU. That is not true for everyone. There are so very many people that are afforded no opportunity, no choice, and no way to protect - never mind improve - themselves. People can want anything in the world, but if they have been rendered powerless - and people ARE rendered powerless - they literally can do nothing to effect change in their lives. Martin Seligman called this “learned helplessness” which Wikipedia describes as “a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to act or behave helplessly in a particular situation — usually after experiencing some inability to avoid an adverse situation — even when it actually has the power to change its unpleasant or even harmful circumstance.” This is not a matter of choice, but a survival setting of the mind - if one cannot escape, one must endure. It is an acceptance of defeat because it is more damaging to fight against the thing you cannot control than it is to lay down and tolerate it. Many people cannot take risks after being conditioned that any attempt to change their circumstance results in their situation worsening. Not everyone can do what is “in demand”…and often, what is “in demand” comes with a minimum wage salary and working poverty. There are just too many barriers beyond that, unless you are born with the privilege to start above by a few rungs of the ladder. We live in a country where the majority of people live somewhere on the lower rungs, while the elite are born at the top.
This country is run by covert oligarchy, not democracy…
(I hope I made sense, it’s tough to write that much and edit properly on a phone.)
turnnoffyourmind
baratheonpilled
gracieabrams
snowghoul
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
2087
areudirty
gummygunk