Be Equal

Last night I was thinking - I talk about equality a lot. Its my thing. Y'know, everybody has a thing. Equality is mine. Gay rights, gender equality, civil rights on a global scale. All men are created equal. Its a beautiful idea (ideal), isn't it? But the truth is, its all a load of bullshit. No no, keep reading. I might not say what you think I'm going to say.

When I say that equality is my thing, I mean big-picture equality. But this starts out so much smaller...or it should, anyway. We need to have equality in our own lives before we can have it in everyone's lives. Think about it. We all assume that we are more something than someone else: smarter, funnier, better looking, a harder worker, a better provider, etc. We know more, we do more, so we are more. Take an honest look. We all do it. I'll be the first to point it out in myself (I'm a bit of an elitist). 

But in order to find ourselves "better than", someone else must somehow be "less than". You can't have "better than" and "less than" and equality at the same time. So yeah, maybe he's funnier or smarter or whatever, but maybe she's prettier or has a better (there we go again) job or something else. Doesn't it all even out in the end? When you strip all of the "betters" away, we're all the same. We are equal. 

There's another thing we do in our everyday lives that gets in the way of equality. We let ourselves get caught up in and defined by our "roles", or we stick other people into them. Now don't get me wrong, roles aren't automatically bad. In fact, they're necessary. What isn't necessary is attaching different levels of importance to them. For example - doctors and lawyers are important (read: make a lot of money), so if you're a doctor or a lawyer, you're "better than". You're better than the teacher that taught you to be a doctor, better than the cop who enforces the laws you uphold as a lawyer, better than the cashier at the grocery store that sells the food that feeds the cops and teacher and doctors and lawyers, and better than the single mother on welfare that raised that grocery store cashier.  

That is what I was talking about earlier when I said it was all a bunch of bullshit. I'm not better than you. You're not better than the woman at McDonald's that gave you your coffee this morning, and she's not better than the guy that's been living on the street for the past year. Get rid of the roles and the titles and the value that we've arbitrarily assigned to them, and we're all the same. Really. 

In yesterday's blog, I said that we should all BE LOVE. Well here's the next step - BE EQUAL. Because we are love and we are equal. Intrinsically. Automatically. So really, I guess, let's just be ourselves. 

Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan... they know what they're talking about.