Equality’s Flawed Image

Equality’s Flawed Image

In the twenty first century a single word has been set as the defining marker for what we should achieve. Our fight for the simple right of equality has propelled us to greater heights of individual wellbeing.  Even in our youth we learn that equality is the golden rule and are engrained with the belief that we must do whatever necessary to achieve it, but our fight for equality is slowly losing its pure justification and morphing into a cover to warrant illegal actions. More specifically our fight for the golden rule has progressed to a level that is too extreme in which we no longer carry its founding merits, but instead evolved it to a method to justify violence. This increase in violence to gain equality has not only led to more dispute but also an infringement upon other rights in which we so desparately also desire, and in this period of change it is vital that we don’t go about changing society for the worse.  This unbalanced equation has led to more inequality and can only be solved by controlling our emotions and resorting to peaceful open protest.

Firstly we have lost the true purpose of equality which has been to move our society forward as a whole and achieve humanitarian harmony. To many people they will consider the absence of equality as an injustice, and believe that they must perform any means necessary to achieve this equality even if it means performing an injustice themselves.  Now this logic is severely flawed in the way that you cannot fix a wrong by performing another wrong. This can clearly be observed in the Ferguson case, a situation which had its proper founding merits for protest, but let emotion take over and escalate it into a riot. When the fight for equality, an act of justice, becomes a violent injustice we can no longer look at the picture as a whole but instead zoom into the individual pieces and evaluate whether we are truly pushing for a good cause the right way. Another example we can look at is the Yale student protest which began over one professor’s opinion on a controversial issue on Native American costumes. In the videos of the protest the professor was harassed and berated for his opinion; the students were shouting demands for him to resign for expressing his freedom of speech. In order to fight for their belief on equality they infringed upon his freedom of speech therefore creating an inequality themselves.

The nation is undoubtedly in a time of great change and because of this we must ensure that our change moves society forward rather than back. We strive to promote equality and give everyone a fair chance; thus equality is a justified goal to achieve, but only if we use proper application. Our desire to create equality no matter the costs has moved us back rather than forward and tainted its pure justification to the point in which we infringe upon other rights to gain it. Society must learn from peaceful methods in the past in order to change ourselves for the better. Martin Luther King and his civil rights protest was a peaceful one and his voice was heard, whereas Malcom X and his black panthers who sought to strike fear in order to invoke change resulted in his imprisonment and eventual assassination. Another example is the Baltimore protests which was founded upon a justified cause but later drew much negativity due to the violence of their act. These protests provide us with the insight needed to help us understand that with peaceful methods the world will listen and as a society we can move forward. The fight for equality has become bloodier than ever, and in the current status quo where we are more educated and developed it is no longer a feasible solution to use violence.