Nobody can really be free until all of us are free, that’s what Martin Luther King said, and that’s not only to do with prejudice but any kind of injustice.
He inspired the world and stood among the perpetrators, but nothing much has changed while we leave patients dying on hospital trolleys, we’re still crying freedom!
And there is still discrimination within our communities and we are presently moving down a dead-end road that can only lead to national disaster with Brexit on the horizon.
Like anyone else, we would like to live a long life but listening about the horrors that took place before I was born was a frightening reality but I always imagined that I was comparatively safe in the United Kingdom.
And now we should be asking ourselves, why are there so many starving people in the United Kingdom, and we should be raising questions about our economic system and what is needed today because it appears that now we have humans with no humanity and we can only dream that one day our children are not judged by the appearance of their skin but by the content of their character.
There was once a legacy given out by Martin Luther King that we would win in the end, so that those who attempt to put people down because of the colour of their skin will ultimately fail, after all, we all have the same colour blood, even if the skin is different, and it’s a disgrace that our education system misses out on educating our children about this and the other wonderous people who have battled throughout history for our rights and freedoms, and which we should be embracing today!
Humans like Martin Luther King and his visions are missing today, and it’s important to know that we were all born different, including shape, colour, language and the ways that we relate with each other, and this in itself should enrich our lives and not fight each other to destroy it.
We have to respect differentiation, to respect each other so that we can live in harmony, this is what makes our life vivid. We either live together as friends or fade away together as a stupid species, and it’s difficult to believe that we still live amidst prejudice and that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be persecuted, but then the establishment always eliminates great people one way or another.
Inequality has continually been a roaring theme and the statistics are still stark with the imprisonment of people with colour that is cosmic. Gay marriages may be taking place but hate crimes and workplace discomfort are still quite real, and women still face threats of violence and lower earnings because of their gender, and people with disabilities and transgender people brave their own struggles for freedom as well.
Everywhere we look, we see differences in wealth, power, and status, and some groups have a higher rank and greater privilege than others, and discrimination is based on race called racism and usually, gender prejudice or discrimination is referred to as sexism, and often discrimination is the result of prejudice which drives people to view certain people or groups as inferior.
If everyone respected each other, societies would truly thrive if people discarded their prejudices and celebrated their differences, and we should encourage understanding and inclusive living, giving people the scope to exercise their beliefs and faiths, but instead, it’s commonplace to say that inequality has reached its peak.
We treat people differently because of their status or perceived class, which in many ways is comparable to racism, sexism, heterosexism and other methods of persecution, and it appears individually through attitudes and behaviours, institutionally through policies and practices, and culturally through the norms and values, and it has a trend of making sweeping generalisations or stereotypes about people, such as ‘poor people or lazy people’.
And social status isn’t just about the cars we drive, the money we make or the schools we attend, it’s more about how we feel, think and act, and as people reconstruct their days, it’s obvious that in every single decision they make, class is an inherent feature, and the implications are larger than our selection of breakfast.
Class affects whether someone is going to be accepted into a particular kind of school, their likelihood of succeeding in that school, the kinds of jobs they have access to and the sort of friends they make, and social class defines as a social context that people inhabit in enduring and pervasive ways over time and is the primary lens through which we see ourselves and others.
Because lower-ranking people have less support and opportunities than those of comparatively high rank, and success for them, consequently, depends on how well they can read, and growing up has a lasting impression on people’s personal and social individualities and this affects both the way they think and feel about their social environment and key features of their social behaviour.
Freedom is a good which all humans possess and to degrade this is deemed an attack on human dignity and on the Rights of Man. But is it true that we can do everything that we want to do?
It is, unless sick or paralysed, that we enjoy certain liberty, freedom of movement because we’re able to move our heads, or lift our fingers, or to run et cetera, but this physical freedom is not unlimited because we can frantically shake our arms but we can’t manage to fly.
Our freedom of movement is dictated by rules which we’re unable to transgress, we can’t live without eating, and to resist against the limits of our physical liberty is futile. On the other hand, if we accept to resign ourselves to the laws of nature, like that of gravity, for example, we can succeed in flying but by going up in an aeroplane.
This same thing goes for the rules of our governments because we’re dictated to by the rules which we seem unable to rebel against. They know we can’t live without eating and that we can’t go without specific things, so we are dictated to by the rules and our physical liberties might be futile, but our spoken words are not, we have a voice and we all have a dream!
