Reflection for Socratic seminar and readings

What does it mean to really be equal? I found myself questioning that through out the readings that I read. One thing that I noticed that the passages had in common was the themes of fear, equality, and morals/ethics. Of all stories that I read the two that made the biggest impact on me were Harrison Bergeron and The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.

While reading Harrison Bergeron I thought about the ways the government were controlling their people. On the first sentence of the story it says, “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. Nobody was smarter than anybody else; nobody was better looking than anybody else.” I believe that in this story the meaning of equality meant that everyone was the same by having the same attributes but they were not equal in the sense that they each had no value.

This led me to the idea of what it really means to be equal. I made a connection to with The Ethics of Living Jim Crow. The African-Americans are not equal because they are treated poorly by the white folks. The government didn’t do anything to stop this but only embraced by having cops purposely trying to target blacks only. On page 5 it says, “Keep still! They ordered. I reached my hands higher. They searched my pockets and; packages. They seem dissatisfied when they could find nothing incriminating.” The police stopped Wright in the story without any reason only seeing that he was black so he must have been guilty. I believe that government has no moral authority to intervene in creating artificial equality. Yet they do not only in those two stories but even now.

As of 2011 gay marriage is still not completely legal. The reasons of this are because some people believe it will ruin traditional marriage, their religion says it’s wrong, and think that gay couples are not capable of being good parents because children need both a woman and man figure in their lives. To this day not everyone is equal, in fact it wasn't that long ago until 1967 where interracial couples were allowed to get married. This idea make me start thinking, well in what ways will society improve? How much longer do people have to wait until people are truly equal? What kind of things that people see as “okay” right now, how will they be seen in the future? What gives people these ideas in their head that it’s okay not to give someone rights or to fear them?

I believe that the media plays a massive role in the way people think of others. For example the way make-up targets women into making them feel ugly or not young enough. Another example is how they always put such negative stories about immigrants or minorities, causing others to fear them. The unfortunate reality is that people choose to listen to what the government/ media tells them what is wrong or right, but all the government is, are just people just like us. So who are they to tell us what is right or wrong? I believe the only solution to such poor judgment is for people to think for themselves and question everything.