Commonplace Conversations

Today I watched two people I interact with regularly talk openly about their role in the patriarchy and how it empowers them to decide who gets medical care. I don’t question their motives. I’m sure they feel lucky to be able to obtain care for themselves and others. But the system they use to do it is about legal parents and maintaining the control of old, powerful people. It’s one of the ways we participate in institutionalized oppression.

You can be happy that you have access to care, even under this oppressive system. We are all fighting for our lives. But you have to be fighting for a system that works for everyone, not content with what our overlords have handed you – not satisfied what they asked you to steal literally from orphans and victims of domestic abuse and the chronically ill and the disabled.

I got to whine about it – or at least a related topic translated into economics – at one of them later, which did help. But it doesn’t really communicate the way this costs not just money but time and stress and dignity and health. I’m lucky enough to be able to scam most of the money I need from capitalists, but even that doesn’t protect me from the suffering the system requires. Or from having people celebrate the way that system rewards them, for their service of being the right kind of patriarchs.

None of us are individually responsible for the existence of oppression. But we are responsible for using our privilege to fight it.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.