I often think why we even discuss treating every-one with the same kindness and respect. Surely we all deserve to be treated equally just because we are human.
Elizabeth Peratrovich who was an equal rights activist for Alaskan natives said this:
“Asking you to give me equal rights implies that they are yours to give. Instead, I must demand that you stop trying to deny me the rights all people deserve”
Sound recent. Actually, Elizabeth Peratrovich was born in 1911.
According to the UN, we have a right simply by being human, to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and an education.
Sound reasonable and straightforward to me? Why are we now and why have we spent so much of our history denying people what they rightfully deserve?
I think it is all about the immense power of the status quo. Keeping things just the way they are is particularly the strongest for those who have the most to lose. They will use anything even religion to justify their actions. Slavery and putting human beings in chains was justified for years and years because it was mentioned in the Bible.
For others it is about if you challenge the status quo, it feels like a repudiation of the structures and beliefs on which they have built their entire lives.
The status quo is also about the messages we hear every day that subconsciously imprints in our minds that: the way it is… is the way it should be.
And when things do change and we see things differently, suddenly it feels just absurd that we even thought that way about another human being. It is hard to imagine now why on earth we put gay men and women into gaol just because of their sexuality! Now we see it as just absurd that we ever thought that way.
There was a show on TV called: My Brilliant Friend. It is about two little Italian girls Lila and Elena growing up in the 1950’s. At one point, there is choice for the girls to continue their education after elementary school. Lila asks her father to go to middle school and it so enrages her father that he literally picks her up and literally throws her out the window.
When I went to school, my catholic high school only went to year 10 because the status quo for girls was that you only needed to work until you got married. I asked to go to Boarding school to go to year 12 and I then asked to go to University. No, I didn’t get picked up and thrown out the window but I was actively discouraged by my mother and when my father finally allowed me to go to University, his Italian friends sought him out to ask him if he was “mad”. How could he let his daughter leave home to go to University? Why does a girl need to go to university anyway!
How education for women was viewed was just part of my family’s mind set and for someone to challenge the status quo was confronting and uncomfortable.
Education for girls and women was and is their human right and for years they were treated as less than human because it was simply just the way it was. For years women who found themselves alone through divorce or vulnerable though domestic violence were, like Lila in My Brilliant Friend, forced into a life of servitude and powerlessness.
But when I graduated and then began my career, it was my mother who realised how absurd the status quo had been and she was the proudest and the greatest advocate of her grand-daughters going to university.
For years black Americans were treated as if they are less than human and there are those who did this and are still doing this blatantly and with malice. But I am sure there were others who just went along with it because it was just the way it was. Brene Brown recently said:
To grow up in America is to grow up with racist ideas being constantly rained into your head and you have no umbrella and you do not even know you’re wet”
Imagine as Brene Brown said, we start to become conscious of what the status quo is telling us through the ideas that are being constantly rained into our heads.
Imagine if we didn’t just see colour or sex or sexuality or age or ability or class and just treated people as equally human.
And imagine by just being human, that is enough justification to be treated with kindness and respect.
All I ask is that when we see people protesting (COVID19'ly safe of course!) or trying to bring forth change, we remember that for some people the status quo actually really, really sucks!
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