Joel Alex, Period 6, 3/28/23

Socio-political Consciousness

• What are your thoughts and feelings about issues of inequity, oppression, and power?

• How do you reflect critically on your own beliefs, assumptions, values, and experiences, and how these can influence your perception of self and others?

Issues of inequity, oppression, and power imbalances can certainly have a major impact on the way we perceive ourselves and others. For example, a person with access to many opportunities and resources in life will have a much different perspective on an issue than someone less fortunate.

There is a famous saying in medicine that states, "Prevention is better than cure." If we take a social or economic issue that causes a large disparity of inequalities between people, we can see that it is much better to prevent the issue from ever arising than to stop its consequences.

Many people think that many issues in society are not solvable or have been indoctrinated into thinking that an issue has existed since the beginning of humanity. This is typically the case, but it is not true. If a country, group, or social movement is founded with morals and values intended not to create major social problems or inequalities, there is far less chance of these inequalities forming. Once conditions arise to form major inequalities, it is very difficult to eliminate them.

Of course, society can never be completely free from inequalities and power imbalances. One thing that humans have practiced since the beginning of time is tribalism. Human evolution has occurred in small hunter-gatherer groups, slowly accumulating into more agricultural societies over time. This means that humans tend to form groups. You could say that it is an evolutionary trait, and you would be correct. It is also one of the reasons why humans and other primates are so much more intelligent than the rest of the animal kingdom.

So, humans create groups and classes. However, that does not mean that these classes or inequalities have existed forever. They are often created by humans and usually intended to create inequalities and power imbalances in society that have not previously existed.

If you feel that something is unjust, I believe that you should do everything in your power to address these problems, regardless of whether they affect you personally. Even if social and economic disparities cannot be solved in our lifetimes, progress can still be made. We should not always use what a government or society says as a means of morality since these things are also socially constructed.

These are my personal views, so they can change over time.