I am old enough to remember the March on Washington of 1963. Not only has racial strife been going on relentlessly all of my own lifetime, and all over the world, not just in the United States, but these have been “the good days,” representing a huge advance over the days when slaves were considered personal property to be bought or sold.
This problem is of monstrous proportions, and I have no solutions to offer here ~ what I want to do is to clarify the problem. As I see it, race is just one part of the whole equation, and I want to look at the problem from a larger perspective. Basically, there is a hierarch of Privilege, Wealth, and Power, but it is not at all so simple as Black and White.
Just running out an idea here, I look at five qualities, all of which are just as important in the equation as “the color of one’s skin.” Each quality runs along a continuum, so I can just list them as ~
1. Healthy ~ Sick
2. Rich ~ Poor
3. Young ~ Old
4. Beautiful ~ Ugly
5. Intelligent ~ Stupid
If we allow a maximum of twenty points for each of these qualities, we end up with a range of 0 ~ 100 points. Now, if we graph the hierarchy of Privilege, Wealth, and Power using these numbers, the result will not at all be a simple color divide. Lots of other qualities could be added to the list ~ Educated ~ Empty; Talented ~ Helpless; Us ~ Them (which is particularly insidious), if we wanted to extend the concept further.
Actually, I do have a solution to this problem. For about fifty years now I have had the idea that the best way to deal with hungry people is to feed them. I propose that a system of free farms should be publicly funded where anyone could live, eat, and sleep for free.
That wouldn’t solve all of the problems, but it would solve most of them.
