EQUALITY

Equality is a powerful word. No matter how, we all react. It’s fundamental, bound up in the very way we see ourselves as Americans. “All men are created equal” is the one line everybody knows. Equality is what set off the Boston Tea Party. "No taxation without representation” is what set off the Revolution. Not everything was equal back then .. slavery comes quickly to mind .. but the concept of equality goes to the very roots of our Constitution, to all the basic rights that make our way of government exceptional. It's why people protest at demonstrations, why they can, and it’s certainly why Ronald Reagan said: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Put simply, equality in America is about equal rights and equal opportunity for everyone, whether you're a coal miner in Pennsylvania, unemployed in Wyoming, or struggling in an inner city. It means you’re an American citizen and you deserve the same rights and opportunities as everyone else, a real chance .. and a voice .. whether you have it yet or not. It does not mean you get economic equality. It's not about everyone having the same things. And it's not about political equality, it’s not about a law or a regulation. Moreover, it may not even be achievable, not for real, not in our lifetime. But that doesn’t matter, because the concept of equality is an ideal, a goal, a thing we as a nation struggle towards, something that is every bit as ephemeral and every bit as important as the concept of achieving perfection in God’s eye.

Before we go any farther, let’s be clear: we’re not talking about religion here, and we’re not talking about politics. We’re certainly not talkingabout being a Democrat or a Republican, or the recent elections, or anything else. And this is not about specific issues or solutions (that is the very essence of politics). No, what we're getting at here is what’s underneath, what’s driving everything we see going on all around us. That is something extremely important for all of us to understand, especially now. Powerful change is going on. We’re literally being assaulted with it, and a lot of it is threatening. All of it is confusing and if we want to step back and see the bigger picture, if we want to rise above the passions and fears of the moment and seek a broader standard to judge things by, to see what is ours to shape, and what lies outside our control, then we need a broader view, one that rises way above things like politics.

Equality is a lofty idea to toss around. Sounds great, but it’s cultural norms .. our underlying social values .. that actually guide how we behave. These norms are like a subconscious rulebook we fall back on to decide what’s acceptable, a kind of unofficial national survey of beliefs. Cultural norms don’t define everyone’s behavior, not by a long shot, but one way or the other they affect all of us.

Back in 1776, the cultural norm was male, Anglo-Saxon white, with a strong dose of racism. Nobody of note was going around demanding women or poor people get the vote, let alone blacks. And yet, when it came time to draft a constitution, some very intelligent men .. white men of privilege .. clung to the idea of equality. It was an idea that just wouldn’t go away, a basic principle that inspired them, and they embedded it into the very fabric of the new government. The entire concept of division of power, let alone the Bill of Rights, is whole-heartedly about equality. These were very human men who did this. Many of them were slave owners. George Washington certainly was, and they all expected their women to curtsy and stay out of the way. And yet these same people struggled mightily over the concepts of "one man, one vote" and “Freedom of Religion”, and they set these principles out in a document that, with all it’s flaws, still serves to guide our nation’s democracy more than two centuries later, a document that truly has made America different.

Of course, it was only a little different at first. For all our Revolutionary victories, we were still English at heart (and in body, sixty-five percent were from the British Isles), and mostly living in rural areas. We were full of the prejudices common to the time. White men owning property ran everything, that was the cultural norm. Less than three percent of the population voted in the first two Presidential elections .. yep, less than 3%. In the 1788-89 Presidential election only six states even held a popular vote.

Equality was certainly talked about a lot. It had just been enshrined in the Constitution and was the subject of a lot of church sermons, but the idea of real equality .. democracy for everybody, emancipation, justice, whatever you want to call it .. didn’t have much practical appeal to it. Cultural norms won out .. they always do .. and equality limped along on the side (poor white men, the blue-collar workers of the day, didn’t get the full right to vote until the mid-1800s).

Then, in the mid to late 1800s, a whole lot of Germans and Irish came over, more than seven and a half million. We may think of these groups as “white” today, but they sure didn’t back then. One educated American described them as “the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish ..”.. 

In the early 1900s, Italians and Jews stormed in (along with a lot of others). All this is a footnote in history texts today, but back then it was considered a national crisis, much more threatening than Hispanic immigration is today. Open racial hatred was common. NINA signs appeared in establishments (No Irish Need Apply). There were riots, and lynchings.

And along the way, of course, we had a war over slavery. All these things together had a major impact on social class and economics in America, which in turn altered the social norms for speech and politics, but the concept of equality still hobbled along. Society just wasn’t ready for it. Women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920, and despite 600,000 people dying in the Civil War, by the early 1900’s, the black ability to vote had actually gone backwards.

Then technology came along.

World War II shook things up enormously, and by then over half of the country lived in cities (75% by 1970), but the real game-changer was TV. In 1950, less than 10% of Americans had a set. By 1960 it was over 87%, and everybody was watching. Suddenly our sense of the world had expanded enormously. As simplistic as many of the images were, you could actually see things that were happening far away, and that changed attitudes. It’s no accident that the Civil Rights Movement sprang into national consciousness in the 1960s, or the Women’s Movement in the 70s. The power of TV to make us aware and change attitudes was incredible. Suddenly you could sit in your living room and watch protesters being fire-hosed in Birmingham, or dead American soldiers being loaded on a helicopter in Vietnam. Major technological innovations always affect society, but TV changed the whole game. Now the unseen social forces pushing change had voice, a loud voice, and things happened. The political landscape itself began a slow-motion upheaval. Voting rights for blacks happened, and the beginning of the Gay Rights movement, and the Women’s Movement, one after the other.

And so social norms began to shift again. It wasn’t an overnight change, it went on for decades, but it was still pretty fast from ordinary folks’ point of view, and there was an enormous backlash. We had rioting and demonstrations, and counter demonstrations, and counter-counter demonstrations. Officials crossed their arms and stood in school doorways, and soldiers escorted little girls to class. All sorts of legislation was passed, cities burned, and an entire region of the country switched political affiliation.

By the 1980s, cultural norms on some very basic issues had settled into something quite different. It was no longer OK to burn a cross or openly espouse racial segregation, or call someone a faggot in public. It still happened of course, a lot, but it was no longer “OK” to the larger society. Socially acceptable behavior had shifted. There was a new norm.

And then the computer showed up. Now it was not only possible to see images from anywhere, it was possible to talk to people anywhere. It was possible to exchange messages with just about anybody and find out just about anything by tapping on a few keys. And you were no longer dependent on a few TV networks for information, now anyone could channel anything, and after the smartphone, you could do it anywhere. Distance and isolation started to disappear.

In 1995, 14% of us used the Internet. Five years later it was 50%. Today it’s close to 90%, and this has had a staggering effect on people, especially the young people who drive so much of change. An entire generation of young people has grown up knowing nothing but instant access to unlimited information. Everywhere. People in small towns can have as much access as people in Manhattan, and that is revolutionary. Fifty years ago Europe was an exotic destination for most people. Now there are cruise ships going to Antartica and no one thinks it’s unusual to go.

Even more, the Internet has created a tremendous sense of connection. It only takes a few clicks to communicate with anyone anywhere. And it only takes a few clicks to find someone to communicate with, about anything. In 2002 there were some 200,000 bloggers. By 2007 there were more than 70 million. Cultural change has sped up yet again, this time exponentially. Eighteen years ago several states refused to honor Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday, ten years later a black man was elected President. The first gay marriage was conducted twelve years ago, today it’s legal everywhere. It’s stunning, and more than a few of us are still stunned, and confused.

As human beings we look at things day-to-day. Issues are what seem to stare us in the face, whatever we’re told is the news of the day. Rioting in Ferguson is about race. Lawsuits about wedding photos is about religious freedom and sexual orientation, objections to women in combat is about the proper role of a woman. Well, Ferguson is about race, especially if you’re personally involved, but racism has been around for a long, long time, and things used to be a lot worse than they are today (somewhere between Jim Crow and slavery).

Things used to be worse for women and gays as well, a whole lot worse. In fact, things used to be a whole lot worse for just about every minority there is in this country, so why are so many people making such a big fuss now?

 Awareness, plain and simple. Awareness for a lot of people has soared .. especially the younger generations .. and with it, expectations. The underlying national mood for a growing number of people is no longer about righting major abuses. That was yesterday. What’s going on now is an increasing impatience over any sort of limitation on equal rights and equal opportunity, leveling the entire playing field.

Well, awareness hasn't soared for everybody. A lot of people liked things the way they were, a lot of people just want to hold onto the values they grew up with. And there’s a lot more going on these days than the struggle for equality. The computer has unleashed a swarm of things on us, troubling things, things like globalization, and outsourcing, and a world financial market able to destroy small towns on the other side of the world with the flick of a finger. These forces are new. Nobody really understands how to deal with them because they’ve never been seen before. Ever. Getting tech support on the phone from someone in Bombay? Having all your clothes made in China, for God’s sake?! Not so long ago, nobody would’ve even been able to imagine it.

At best, these economic forces are both good and bad. At worst, they have devastated whole communities, left entire ways of life in shreds, created dislocation and pain on an entirely new level. Just go to West Virginia, or Detroit. You can reach out and touch it.

The move towards equality is different from all of this. That’s what’s confusing so many people. Jobs disappearing overseas is absolutely, frighteningly new. The drive for equality in America is not. It’s not even American. The hunger for equality goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and probably a long time before that. The idea of equality has always been there. It’s suffered through ups and downs, but it's what eventually ended slavery. Then it turned into the seeds of democracy in Europe and basic human rights, and after awhile it spread to America. And in America, in our country, something quite different happened. 

Slaves of have always wanted to be free. Every ethnic and religious group in the world has always wanted to improve their lot. But they don’t usually care about improving anybody else’s lot. Americans, of course, are just as human as anyone else. The abolitionists fighting to end slavery weren’t particularly concerned about the women all around them, and the quote mentioned before about “the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish ..” came from from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the leading suffragettes of her time. As individuals, we’ve got just as much racism and prejudice and self-centeredness as anyone else, and we will as long as people are human.

What’s different, what’s so wonderfully different, is our heritage, the ideals America is founded on. What sets us apart, the true source of “American exceptionalism”, is the fact that the concept of real equality for everyone is woven into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It’s our very history, emblazoned for all to see in the documents we hold so dear. “All men are created equal” isn’t a slogan. It’s something we learn as little children, something that’s part of our national mythology.

The struggle for equality .. equal rights and equal opportunity for every citizen .. isn’t about politics. It isn’t about being a Liberal or a Conservative, and it definitely isn’t about moving to the Left or the Right. It’s not about that sort of thing at all, it’s about moving Up. Equality is about seeking a vision that transcends our day-to-day divisions and disagreements. Equality is a belief, a goal that rises above partisan politics and says that equal rights and equal opportunity should belong to everyone, every citizen that lives. Period. Everything else that’s going on .. all the political arguments and passions that seem to consume us, and will for a very long time .. all that is about how.

This is what’s so terribly important for all of us to understand. At the most fundamental level, all the social confusion we’re going through these days isn’t about race, or homosexuality, or gender. It’s about establishing once and for all that every citizen in this country deserves equal rights and equal opportunity .. a real chance and a real voice, whether they live in a small town left behind by technology, or a slum in Los Angeles .. that anything short of that betrays the American ideal. It’s why the NCAA moved the 2017 Finals out of Charlotte. Not because transgenders are a significant part of their commercial public, but because the new cultural norm says it is no longer acceptable to publicly support discrimination against anyone. And, yes, that is the new cultural norm .. a contested one, a bitterly-fought one in some quarters .. but the fact that a corporate giant, one with no moral values save corporate interests would take such a stand, that a wide variety of large corporations would, says it all. A point in cultural time has passed. An over-arching new norm is being established, a growing sense among more and more people that it’s time to end the issue once and for all, that it’s time to live up to the ideal that was at the root of our nation’s founding.

The problem is how, and that is the tricky part. Don’t let anybody fool you. No one knows how to create true equality because nobody’s ever done it before. Nobody even knows what it looks like. Americans have certainly never seen it before. The world has never seen it before.

And that brings up the even trickier part: none of us is neutral. We are all prejudiced, no matter what we believe (oh, yes, you too). And all the while we’re trying to figure this out, we’re being assaulted by all the other new forces that have been unleashed, by disappearing jobs and crushed ways of living, by children sexting on their ever-expanding smart phones and world terrorism coming to our doorstep and too many other things to list here.

What we need is a beacon. This country will remain divided and screaming at itself for a long time. Politics will remain confusing, and often contradictory. What the nation needs is a clear statement of principles, a non-political definition of equality that enshrines where we want to go, something so fundamental that in the middle of all the vicious political battles to come, we can all still agree on it. We need a light on the horizon, something that says though we may all be flawed as human beings, this is what we strive for, something simple and straight-forward, devoid of politics or practical solution, devoid of what we should do next year, or even five years down the road. It needs to be something so basic and clear that we can all look to it on the horizon as we descend into the frightful reality of trying to achieve it, something so righteous that absolutely nobody can deny it, something like this: 

            We, the American people, believe in the following for all our citizens:

•    Equal rights

•    Equal opportunity

•    Equal justice

•    And an equal voice

Deep down in our hearts that is what so many of us long for, something clear and unequivocal that says .. no matter how long it takes, no matter which road is chosen .. this is what America means. This is what we want for the country we love, something enshrined in those other powerful words everyone knows: “with liberty and justice for all”.

by J.M. Purvis