Here’s a tasty board-served set of Social Justice issues! I’m not going to demean these by saying “it’s juuuust my opinion” because these are opinions many good-hearted, well-informed people share!
Black Lives Matter We just need to say that first, and often, and probably for a long time. (Source of comic below )
Cops are mostly bastards. It’s not entirely their fault - they are heavily trained into it - except for the ones it totally is , and there are notable exceptions that prove the rule.
Women’s health is social justice, and it’s good health for everyone, because the patriarchy and the resulting disproportionate contribution by women to the family well-beings.
I admit that this was not a causation that was particularly obvious to me as a youth, nor even an adult, until relatively recently. In fact, I’m quite sure that I have sometimes unconsciously and sometimes not sought out my own comfort along this vector before. Comfort is seductive and humans are also widely prone to like the things that support our desire to be lazy.
If this whole post has a point, I’ll bury it here: Be very, very conscious about your laziness. It shouldn’t hurt others.
COVID-19 impacts follow socio-economic gradients.
Science has concluded that the negative impacts of stress may be inherited and certainly a stressful, under-resourced environment during development is bad for children. So it should come as no surprise that if you systemically do that to a population segment for generations then those folks will not be well setup for either defending themselves against a raging pandemic nor surviving it. Thus, systemic racism in the United States has led to outsize deaths among Black+, Hispanic+ Latinx, and well, non-White Americans across the board
. I wonder how those correlate to the equally outsized incarceration rates.
Additional point: It’s the racism. And for some, the racism informs their response. By some I definitely mean the President Trump.
As I write this the U.S. is at ~225,000 deaths . Unconscionable. Monstrous. Was avoidable.
What you should do.
- Vote for Democrats.
I hear you, you’re a registered Republican, or an Independent tired of the 2-party system. Well, friend, I’m a progressive who’s registered as a Democrat because they can win substantiative elections right now. And right now, the only moral choice is to vote out the party that has lead us to this hideous morass.
“Oh, but Democrats don’t have clean hands!!! You can’t trick me!!!” Well spotted! Democrats do not have clean hands! But the anti-democracy and inhumane arc of the Republican Party are far more advanced and they are the only other party that can win substantiative elections.
Vote. Them. Out.
We must put the other issues (and we must address them) after.
- Embrace anti-racism in your daily life.
It’s not enough to seek to be egalitarian. Anti-racism is the only boat on the lake and we’re all drowning.
- Promote women.
Dudes, this one is for all y’all. Don’t base your defense of women (trans women are women ; TERFs will be turfed) on “I have women in my life. So obviously I am pro-woman.”
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez handled this one aptly, recently. Ma’am?
Rep @AOC: "I do not need Rep. Yoho to apologize to me. Clearly he does not want to. Clearly when given the opportunity he will not & I will not stay up late at night waiting for an apology from a man who has no remorse over calling women & using abusive language towards women." pic.twitter.com/XKymFh3Oyf
— CSPAN (@cspan) July 23, 2020