It’s hard to argue whether or not we all as individuals have the same potential towards achieving success. It’s even harder to say whether or not any of us will gain any sort of social mobility in our lifetimes. And it’s impossible to know whether we’ll stay at that higher status, or eventually come back down to where we started, or even in a worse condition.
But what is success? It differs for everyone. But unarguably, true American democratic individualists would like believe that everyone can achieve whatever they desire within a society, especially if it is able to be provided by that society. But what if that society doesn’t permit such success? Or perhaps it does, but it depends on your race, class, and gender. Logically you can’t have fairness and equality if only the certain select are provided with the opportunity to succeed.
America can’t promise that everyone will get to the same place. We can’t expect everyone to get to the top of the mountain. We can’t guarantee that there won’t be struggle, death, and hardship when it comes to personal achievement and survival as a human being. We can’t even admit whether anyone will ever be able to live a qualitative lifestyle. But we should be able to promise everyone that such achievement is possible. The problem inherit in this promise, is that such a promise can’t be kept as long as inequalities exist, more specifically, opportunistic inequality.
An equality of opportunity is something that should be importantly implemented in our society, and prioritized in an effort to have a stable society, and therefore a stable civilization, and eventually a more stable nation as a whole. An order theorist would argue that the system we already have in America is fine, and that it is essentially functional for everyone. Functional? Yes. For everyone? No.
Our country is a huge pyramid scheme built on the backs of slaves and the genocide of a native poulation. MTA buses and subway lines are the modern day multicultural slave ships to low paying jobs that cloud dreams of social mobility. Crime-ridden neighborhoods and deteriorating infrastructure lowers the morale of communities already caught in a circling downward spiral of poverty. Lack of employment forces people into desperate situations where the range of things they are willing to do just to have some food on the table, legally or illegally, have broadened. An educational drought has only led to an institutional funneling of our youth into the prison-industrial complex. The racial profiling, police brutality, and domestic violence troubling these people make home an unsafe place to be, knowing that state-funded terrorists dressed in white hoods never have been, and never will be persecuted for their hate crimes. And all the while, a president who gave us all hope, fails to respond to the needs of his own people, but rather to those of the rich, white capitalist class that controls the money, and therefore the decisions of our politicians.
“Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free”, said Andy Duphraine, a character who played a wrongfully convicted prisoner in the popular 1994 film Shawshank Redemption. If we were to ever have a good start going toward having an equality of opportunity and our runner is on the track ready to pass the baton, the runner is going to need something to keep him going when his legs are ready to give out. He’s going to need some heart, some extra power, some nourishment, some water, but most of all, some hope. Hope is what our communities need right now, and although some would argue implementing hope is not the government’s job, it should surely be Uncle Sam’s side activity when he gets home from work.
Having experienced so much racism and classism in our society, how would anyone within the oppressed class expect to gain any success in our nation, especially in a culturally pluralistic approach? “The system’s broken, the school’s closed, the prison’s open” said rapper Kanye West in his song ironically titled “POWER”. There are definitely people who are in power in this nation, or who desire such power, and will stop at nothing to defend the current matrix of domination that we live in. Until this system is reconstructed, our society's minds will continue to enroll into a system of circular thinking that keeps the poor in poverty and the rich in power. This is all part of the internal colonialism practiced by the capitalists of this nation, except it doesn’t only exist in our day-to-day experiences, it also exists in peoples’ minds, holding them prisoner to their own ignorance, fear, and lack of hope.
My proposal is not only to prioritize a true equality of opportunity in our nation, but also an equality of hope. The fear instilled in our society, the people’s dependence on a broken system, and the socialization that white, male, old capitalists have injected in our peoples mind will keep them imprisoned unless until the light of truth emerges into a forward way of thinking.
If we boost the morale of the people of this country, if people begin to believe that they can actually make a difference in this country, if people become aware of the mindsets that hold them prisoner, and the overseers that watching over us in our fields, then we could possibly act upon that belief, and fix our society. When peoples’ hopes are up, when the clouds of depression blow away, when the system no longer brutalizes and punishes the poor, when the rich can give up everything they have and enter the kingdom of heaven on earth, when the concepts of greed and personal gain become mere kid’s stories instead of a lifestyle to kill for, then possibly we could all live happier and healthier lives.
Martin Luther King’s dream may have been conceived, but it has yet to be manifested. The boundaries of class division have yet to be broken. The ancient history of gender inequalities have yet to be taken more seriously. Expired concepts of “age of readiness” still reign over our population, and America has yet to be color-blind, but has rather attempted to conceal its racism by using green as the most dominant color in our pallet that is our nation's diversity.
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