Dreams of Equality

Today, we watched The Colbert Report, the episode where Edwards comes out and does the “edWords” of the day. Putting aside the frequent comments on Jetskis, Edwards rather crudely paraphrased Martin Luther King Jr., stating that he would like to see the day when his children could wake up in a world where economic equality was more than just a fantasy.

It’s a nice thought. But one that – I’m afraid – is an impossibility.

This is not to say that I believe poverty is a necessity. I don’t. I cheered as loud as anybody when feudalism fell. I even think that it is possible to functionally eradicate poverty, at least within the Western World. But I do not think that economic equality is feasible in any way.

We’ve reached the point in the historical timeline when the Cold War has become history. When college students were no longer alive at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and rapidly approaching the time when they won’t have been alive for the fall of the USSR. I remember both. My parents remember Vietnam, my grandparents World War II.

Equality in any sense is a utopian pipe dream. It’s a nice dream, yes. But only a dream. Like Willy Loman’s “well-known.”

I believe that, inherently, people are equal. No skin color or gender or genetics or ethnicity or sexual preference is inherently better or worse than any other. People are equal.

Society is not. Class, status, education, employment. All these are divisive and discordant. They rank us by our grades, by our height, our weight, our standardized test performance, our salaries. They look at the industries in which we choose to work – entertainment, education, business, service, public service – and at the communities in which we live – urban, suburban, rural – as barometers of our worth as people. They rank us by the degrees written upon pieces of paper and upon the university or college seal that adorns the top.

We are divided by religion. Each religious organization, sect, and denomination privileging one another differently. It is the same with regionalism and nationality.

We tout the value of equality and then conspire against ourselves by applying false labels and hierarchies, undermining our own proclamations with hypocrisy.

Communism is a nice theory. But in practice, people are not designed, not engineered, not bred to quietly acquiesce to our own diminishment. And that, ultimately, is what pure equality would do. Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s 1984. There can be no true equality without the complete annihilation of everything that makes us truly human.

We are not all equal. We never will be. But let us define our inequalities by things other than skin color or national origin or gender or sexual preference. Define our inequalities not as “good” and “better,” or “bad” and “worse,” but by “this” and “that.” Let us define our inequalities as what we do and what we believe in, rather than our genetics or the happenstance of our birth. Let us choose how we wish to differ, and respect the fact that we are not equals, nor should we be. I am smarter than many people. But there are many people more skilled than I am in many ways. Stronger or faster or more dexterous or more graceful or more mathematically minded or musically talented. We are both greater and lesser than one another. This is not equality. It is diversity.

Let us be content with our inequality, let us celebrate our inequality, and accept that, ultimately, we are as high above others as others are above us.