Equal Rights and Justice

I think we should strive for equal rights, and that is an extremely safe position to take. You won't find too many people saying that we should steer clear of equality for all. There are certainly enough people who say it to cause people to be worried (or it should cause people to be worried anyway), and there are definitely enough people who don't really believe it to make me worry, and without a doubt the number of people who actually strive versus the number of people who say we should strive is a small enough fraction to cause concern. But I'll say it, and I hope that, if a time comes when I can prove that I'm not just saying, "Equal rights, rah rah!" I will prove it.

The problem is that many people seem to believe that the best way to ensure equality is to remove privilege. In other words, if you want to ensure that everyone has equal voting rights, make it so that no one can vote. It's equal, right? Zero is equal to zero. And it works; if no one has rights, then everyone is equal. So in order to elevate the downtrodden, some people seem to feel that it's easier to simply lower the heights to a more scalable loftiness. It's usually cheaper, sometimes simpler, and it makes the downtrodden get a feeling of, "Yeah, we got those elite bastards good, didn't we?"

Usually, that's the way communist countries start out. Instead of trying to improve the lot of the peasant, they knock the aristocrat out of the equation completely and then everyone lives like peasants. Burma, or Myanmar, or whoever they are now, appears to be taking this route, and taking it hard. But there are usually a few people who still get to be higher, the "more equal than the rest" crowd. And they see to it that everyone else stays equal to zero, or maybe even slips into negative numbers. Liberation through work, as it were. Funny, that slogan sounds oddly familiar.

Liberation and equality should be elevations. They should not have to result from the other guy getting taken down a peg. Freedom and rights are things the oppressed need to win, not things that the oppressors need to lose. Equal rights and justice is not just a Bob Marley song. Equality without justice means that everyone is equally screwed. And equality at zero is not something to shoot for.