When we schmooze with friends and neighbors, we complain about our daily insecurities. We share our joys and our worries. It’s how we connect.
These days, insecurity is pervasive.
“If the landlord sells my building, will he jack up the rent or evict me?”
“If my house gets reassessed, will I be able to afford the taxes?”
“If our school district lays off teachers to save money, will my kids be, OK?”
“If my elderly mother needs a medical procedure or drug not covered by Medicare, how will we care for her?”
Sometimes these insecurities are buffered by, “Luckily, I have a good landlord,” or “By serendipity, I got a low mortgage rate just in the nick of time,” or “Fortunately, my kid goes to a great school,” or “By chance, I found a pretty good doctor.”
Well-maintained affordable housing, consistently good education for our children, and hassle-free high-quality medical care shouldn’t be matters of luck. It ought to be the rule, not the exception. Counting on fleeting luck is no way to live. The lack of control associated with luck fosters the insecurity we’ve grown to endure but don’t deserve.
We need to be in control. We can be. It’s time to get angry, not resigned to fate. It’s time to take action–together.
In a recent article in the New York Times, Astra Taylor argued that existential insecurity is an unavoidable feature of life that affects us all regardless of race and class. However, her main point was that insecurity is not equitably distributed. It is framed by inheritance and race. That unequal distribution is not preordained. It is planned.
The ways we structure our societies could make us more secure; the way we structure it now makes us less so. I call this “manufactured insecurity.”
An inescapable feature of life in the United States in the twenty-first century is that the relative security of the minority with access to power and influence and with more wealth and advanced education is contingent on two things: First, the rest of us must accept our disempowerment and insecurity as normal and out of our control. Second, we must either blame insecurity on one another or our personal shortcomings, thereby denying it as a manufactured societal choice.
We need to gain control. We can. It’s time to get angry, not resigned to fate. It’s time to take action–together.
Our common language obfuscates the truth. We call the wealthy the fortunate. However, their relative security is not contingent on luck but primarily on inherited privilege. The media loves to highlight the moving stories of economic triumph over adversity due to exceptional personal effort without challenging the existence and necessity of a ladder of success just to meet basic needs.
We all need housing, education, and health care, but they have never been guaranteed–as they should be– as rights in the United States. There is the pervasive dread that an unpredictable twist of fate could turn good luck, bad. For the rest of us, too often there is a depressing sense of insecurity’s inevitability. The resultant anxiety either cripples challenging action or breeds resentment.
The terrible blossoming of corrosive resentment, anger, and divisiveness plaguing the United States is manufactured too. From the displacement and extermination of indigenous people to slavery to exploiting successive waves of immigrants, it always has been. Notably, while this resentment is now funded by a small number of billionaires, it has taken on a life of its own. The raw emotions and belief systems are simultaneously controlled and dangerously out of control.
To mediate the terror about it all, we need to gain control. We can. It’s time to get angry, not resigned to fate. It’s time to take action–together.
The current all-out assaults on unions, efforts to combat climate change, abortion and voting rights, any government programs to support wellbeing, marriage equality, normalizing differences in gender identity, and protections for immigrant asylum seekers are all intentionally promoted to hamper and avoid the one thing that can bring us the power we need to secure the peace of mind we all crave and deserve: Cross-racial, -ethnic, -gender solidarity.
Maybe the most telling offensive is the multi-state effort to control what students learn to whitewash our shared history of oppression and struggle. Picking off minorities and turning us against one another is still necessary but no longer sufficient. Youth will become the majority. Now, a new generation of voters needs convincing that inequity is normal and out of their control lest they become activists for different goals and values.
Our unfortunate history is that reluctance to call out and confront no-so-latent, deep-seated prejudices has crippled most struggles to amass the power necessary to build a secure future for all of us. That failure has been the essential contributor to our manufactured insecurity. It’s the last thing we want to talk about but the most vital.
As Astra Taylor aptly pointed out, the antidote to a life of insecurity is solidarity.
We need to gain control. We can. It’s time to get angry, not resigned to fate. It’s time to take action–together to manufacture a different future.
Arthur taught and led science professional learning and curriculum and assessment development projects for 50 yrs. He writes about education and social justice. He loves spending time with friends and family, hiking, and gardening.
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