A Proposition unfulfilled

150 years ago words spoken by President Lincoln, still haunt us.  Not because of their insight, not because of their brevity, not because of the poetic cadence, but because they remain largely unfulfilled.

"...dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal..."

This remains an unfulfilled proposition.  The proposition, as I understand it, was that the law should be blind.  All of us start at the same point, and what we do with our lives is a product of our own industry, insight, intelligence, perseverance and intellect.  Yet we continue to not see each other as equals.  We are a selfish and competitive lot.  We use the law and taxes to try to force equality upon us, but those efforts make the proposition of equality yet more difficult to attain.

We recognized that race was making winners and losers in society so we wrote laws requiring a balanced workforce regarding race.  We wrote laws to balance college admissions by race.  We wrote laws that moved money around based on race.   We reasoned that since race was the root of the problem, race could be used to solve it.   But when you dig deep, those laws are doing exactly the opposite of what they should be doing.  Someone is being denied a job or a promotion, or entrance into a college because of the color of his skin.  The person on the losing end of that proposition is not likely to take a position that this is ok because its payback for past wrongs.  It only perpetuates, at a minimum, hard feelings and at worst racism.

How do we define ourselves racially speaking?  What makes us black or white or Asian or Hispanic? We have a president who we call "black," yet his mother is, by most definitions 100% white.  How do we reconcile that?  Can anyone really define race anyway?  It seems to me it is entirely a fabrication of our society designed to push white people to the top of the social standing - affording them better opportunity for power and wealth.

I believe that until the day comes when the law can not tell the difference between a man and a woman, a black man and a white man and an Asian and an Indian and a Hispanic, between gay and straight, the rich and the poor ... until that day comes, much of our law is just an exercise in optics. When in our own minds we can look at each other at a level deeper than color, when we can take a measure of each others character, we will be stuck in an unequal world.

Perhaps in another 150 years, after more homogenization of our DNA, we can see those words as the "realization that all of us are created equal"