Rugged Individualism, Systemic Injustice, and Sharing Resources for a Better World

A thought for this morning: our nation has an almost cult-like devotion to 'rugged individualism,' in which we have learned to reject systemic understandings of doing good and doing harm.

This ripples out in many painful ways. We denigrate ideas of forming systems to ensure that all people in our nation have access to adequate food, shelter, healthcare, education, meaningful, constructive vocation, and caregiving support. If a person lacks any of these, then we assume it must be a personal moral failing. If there is racism or sexism, then it is a matter of individual personal choices or 'bad apples,' rather than systems designed to discriminate. If we have relatively few struggles for survival in our personal lives, we attribute it to our personal merit.

In these pandemic times, rather than creating systems to ensure the largest umber of people survive, we leave those who already carry the greatest burdens in our society to wrestle with more impossible choices. The countries which have come through this time most successfully were the ones who ensured their people could afford life's basic needs even if they couldn't work.  In this country, we heaped shame on people who were already suffering.

I often think of the enormous human potential we waste because we are so certain our neighbor does not deserve what we have; and that fulfilling our own wants are more important than ensuring everyone's basic needs are met. We could do so much better; we could be so much more, if we weren't constantly tearing others down for trying to survive in a system that is so fragmented and broken. Our systems are designed for a few to benefit, and for most to struggle until their dying breath.