Our proposed new way of considering our principles has invited me into this series of reflections. These are my musings. What is equity, and what would it be or mean without being rooted in love?
Equity recognizes that while it’s basic justice to assert everyone’s right to the same basic resources for living, not everyone is starting from the same place. Equity insists that justice also insure the resources one needs for a fair start and an equal opportunity for a good outcome.
As I consider that basic definition, it stirs something uncomfortable in me. When I dig around in my inner world of relational reactions, what I come to see are the attitudes that have been effectively established within me as I have lived in this particular American environment over the last 60+ years. Without ever saying it much out loud, I have been formed to think that my own good outcomes depend on being able to look around and notice that I’ve done better than others have.
Despite plenty of evidence from around the world that universal health care works, that ensuring equal pay among genders for equal work can be done, that a living wage can be paid to all adults in a country in a sustainable way, Americans continue to stand with disregard and distrust for these attempts at equality and equity. Reparations for systemic injustices done to indigenous and African peoples is beyond what we are willing to consider, so far. This unwillingness to consider equity on multiple levels seems to go against this notion that if we worked to insure equity, it would leave us with no one worse than us to compare ourselves to. We often vote against our own best interests because we want to be one of those at the “top” one day, but if there’s no one at the bottom, how can we enjoy the experience? For example, just suggest that the current horrific student loans be forgiven, and there begins an outcry of “why did no one do this for me? Why should it be done for them?” In other words, you are taking away those whom I am currently able to look down on.
Isn’t this a problem of holding onto some ideas about equality and equity not grounded in love? Love fosters the well-being of all and requires that no one be on the bottom. Equity grounded in love–how can we work on this in our lives?
~Bob Patrick
Thank you Bob for giving voice to this. It is difficult to realize how little real progress we have made in our society in embracing equity for all, and I always ask myself, why? Perhaps because we do not begin with love?
Love the way this ties into our themes and goals. Thanks for sharing
A Big question and a Philosophical enterprise to seek the sources of inequity and to accept a challenge to level the playing field…but even that is no longer the panacea for inequity. To resolve this Big conundrum, maybe it is time to open another window of perception and say right out loud that inequity is basic to the human condition and that Love mitigates the discrepancy between those that have and “other” have nots. It’s neither a low or high bar, it’s a bar most of us can pass if we can stop blaming the “haves” for the “have nots”. This takes up too much energy and blurs the ability to see cause/effects of inequity. The playing field will always need multi levels for those that enter the “game” from different beginnings. Love helps open the window of perception, love could bulldoze the playing field, love renders the mind and heart supple so we can be open to potential resolution no matter where we stand on the
continuum of privilege.
All this is coming from a person who is comfortable and likes to toy with big concepts on a rhetorical basis. I must seem arrogant. If my life situation forced me into the underprivileged caste, I would not have the same voice…
What I love here, Katrina, is that you are juggling how love and equity work together. I suspect that there are many ways. What troubles me the most is not how you or I or someone else proposes love and equity work together but those who don’t see equity as an issue at all, and certainly don’t imagine love having anything to do with the problems of equity.
Such an insightful way to look at equity! I often hear people say things like this: There are people who are able to lift themselves out of poverty, so everyone who is poor could do this if they work hard enough. They discount the other things that hard work will cannot overcome. Most of the people I know who work the hardest still do not earn enough money to live comfortably on. These are many other inequities people have in their lives that keep them down, and prevent them from earning enough money to live on.