The Disparity of Equality in a Socially Divided Age!<\/p>\n
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February 10, 15<\/p>\n
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A very interesting book and I love some of the things Zygmunt Bauman brings out in Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. <\/em>I could have written a lot in this book because of having to experience it while growing up. My first encounter was going to Santa Monica City College and I was from South L. A. (South Central L. A.) and I really did not know that I was poor until I went to Santa Monica. That\u2019s how you feel if you are always around people. I saw people from different races driving Mercedes Benzes, eating whatever they wanted for lunch and dressing up to date. And they were the same age as me. I began to realize that I did not want to just go to school I wanted to make sure that I did not end up the way people looked in my neighborhood when I got off the bus from school. I began to realize that something was seriously wrong with society. Its not my fault that I was born into the family I did just like it\u2019s not the fault of a person is rich to be born in the family they did. But there are certain advantages that they will have that I don\u2019t. Ant this is where the disparity of equality kicks in.<\/p>\n People love to call the welfare system a handout system. I used to think that way too but because of the advantages that some people have I don\u2019t see that way anymore and from what Bauman said I think it should be renamed. \u201cMore than anything else, the \u2018welfare state\u2019 (which, I repeat, is better called a \u2018social state\u2019, a name that shifts the emphasis away from the distribution of material benefits and towards the community-building motive of their provision).\u201d It is the job of society to have programs that help protect citizens from disadvantaged background of falling into inevitable consequences. I believe this is important in society as well as in the church. I want to at some point acquire faith-based grants to have programs at my church that can give a person a fair chance to succeed.<\/p>\n We are human beings and when capitalism and the development of systems that are geared to keep the poor poorer and the rich richer prevail, people begin to devalue people who are not like them. The bad thing is that\u2019s the wrong concept. \u201cEver more profuse laws, decrees and orders tend to \u2018radically erase any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being.\u201d[3]<\/a> I know what that is like when society makes it harder for a poor person to make it and then call them lazy and a substandard human.<\/p>\n I really like this book and I want to write more on so many subjects I have encountered but now I am faced with what to do about it. And that\u2019s what gets me the most. I still fight an uphill battle with institutions and churches that like it the way it is!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Bauman, Zygmunt (2013-04-18). Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age (Kindle Locations 325-326). Wiley. Kindle Edition.<\/p>\n
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\nA social state is a better word. People who are born in a poor sociological background need a level playing field if society is trying change the situation society is in. Case in point I remember back in the day they said that Affirmative Action was wrong. Well to me it just helps to level the playing field for poor people who had nothing to do with what family they were born in. I remember when I was at Santa Monica College I was only accepted to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in their exclusive architectural program through a program called the Equal Opportunity Program. I was a C student and that program was impacted but they allowed disadvantaged students to have a shot at learning in a major program like theirs. I know that some people miss use programs but Bauman is right when he says society should shift its emphasis to the community-building motive of their provision. I never let where I have come from stop me nor do I believe in making excuses but trust me the disparity is large to an African American from Watts than a person growing up in middle class America. \u201cA state is \u2018social\u2019 when it promotes the principle of communally endorsed, collective insurance against individual misfortune and its consequences.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n