INVISIBILITY & inequality

Throughout my life, I’ve come to find that we value the lives of individuals differently, and treat them accordingly. The more differences we perceive, the less value we see, and the less equal we treat these individuals or groups.

We’ve created a hierarchy of value, in which we’ve assigned positions based on the perceived worth and use the found differences to justify unequal treatment. This means that what is acceptable for one group, is unacceptable for another ranked higher. For example, we treat pigs as lesser beings, often justifying this by claiming they are less intellectually and emotionally evolved. However, research shows that a pig’s emotional intelligence is similar to that of a 3-year-old human child. While it is deemed acceptable to confine, neglect, forcefully impregnate (and thus rape), abuse, kill, and eat pigs, we would never accept this if it happened to a human child, even though both would suffer similarly.

History, as well as current events, show us how great apathy, and even cruelty, can come from this way of thinking. We’ve massacred our own kind, based on the differences in appearance or culture. We destroy our planet, the source of all life, as we’ve placed ourselves in the middle of the circle of life, rather than as a part in it, exploiting all that surrounds us.

The apathy we exhibit, and the consequences of it, are conveniently hidden from sight. When we can’t remove it out of sight, and therefore out of mind, we choose to turn a blind eye. We pay slaughterhouse workers to do the dirty work for us, but refuse to look at what happens inside. We lock away criminals, as we hate to be confronted of what another human, and therefore possibly ourselves, is capable of under the right circumstances and state of mind.

We ignore all those who reflect what we don’t want to see. Their existence and treatment a testimony of the very sides of us that we ourselves have deemed immoral and unacceptable. Yet instead of dealing with the root of these issues that lies within each one of us, we more often deal with the consequences outside of us. Just think about it. We’re dedicated to save the turtles, reacting almost allergically to plastic straws, but are ignorant to the fact that their main cause of death is due to bycatch, at the hands of the fishing vessels we send out to rob the sea of their food for the sake of the taste and/or tradition of our meals.

Through all of this, not once did we actually see the individual we assigned the value to. We don’t see a pig, we see a product. We don’t see the broken parts of our society, we see the criminals that were born from them. We strip them away from their identities, and therefore their very being. Prisoners are assigned a number, just like livestock, and animals aren’t addressed as “them”, but as “it”, just like any other product.