By Krystal Ball
Opinion Contributor
Watching my little 18 month old confidently waddle around his weekend exploring the world, I realized that one of the things that’s so joyful about being around little one’s is that they haven’t absorbed all of our cultural programming yet.
She doesn’t yet know that she’s supposed to look a certain way or act a certain way or live in a certain kind of place.
She hasn’t yet internalized the unspoken caste system that dictates where everyone falls in our national pecking order.
Almost everyone buys into some version of this caste system.
We fall for its siren song because it tells us who we get to be better than. Maybe we are better than because we think we are smarter, or more moral, or have more money or are white. We like the feeling of being better than.
But we don’t get to have better than without having worse than.
Not as rich, not as smart, not as accomplished, not as sober. And what’s really pernicious is that this caste system doesn’t just give us a pecking order, it tells us that some people are fundamentally worthy and some people are not.
Some people count, some people matter, some people don’t.
Intellectually most people know that this isn’t true.
We can all mouth the words that every human is fundamentally worthy, but we don’t act like it. We don’t even believe it about ourselves.
What would it look like if we all fundamentally accepted our own worthiness?
Not because we went to the gym every day and lost those 20 pounds. Not because we got a job with a nice title and a mansion.
Not because we did a single thing to earn it. Just because we are. Once we accept our own basic worthiness we cannot help but see the basic worthiness of every other human.
And once we’ve done that, I cannot imagine us continuing to tolerate the society we’ve constructed. A society where we choose mass incarceration, homelessness, indifference in the face of a massive addiction crisis.
In the same way that my Ida Rose is perfect and worthy just because she is. Her little chubby legged exuberant self-bounding across the lawn. So are you.
Believing that one small thing could change the world.
Krystal Ball is the co-host of “Rising,” Hill.TV’s morning news show.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill.
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