Worthiness Concept Threatens Equality
by Ms. Boomer-ang
In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, animals take over a farm and paint on a wall “an unalterable law by which all animals” there “must live forever.” This law was a list of commandments, one of which was: “all animals are equal.” But eventually the only commandment remaining read: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Likewise, many of those who loudly sign on to human rights, protections, and respect for everybody nevertheless designate some humans as less worthy of these rights and therefore less equal.
The concept of worthiness and unworthiness arose when Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman observed the media considering some murdered activists more “worthy” of praise and attention than others.1 In addition, Dr. Jacqueline H. Abernathy’s June 6, 2023 Consistent Life blog post noted that different political parties consider different people more “worthy” of government support. Meanwhile society and policymakers tend to consider some people less worthy of respect and human rights than others.
Examples follow:
Ethnic and Racial Minorities
In 2009, I visited a prestigious European Union secondary school. One corridor displayed student artwork and posters, in English, for a project on diversity, equity, inclusivity, and tolerance. Along with their calling for accepting all sexual habits, some also recited phrases against racial and religious prejudice. The posters could have passed for products of a North American school.
But people in the same European school repeatedly warned me to avoid Roma. They blamed all crime on Roma.
And when I traveled around the area, a stationmaster warned me to keep my possessions in sight, because “the Roma steal.”
Back in the US, I would have guests from an international peace organization that boasted about embracing all nationalities and lifestyles. One who came from the European Union (a different part than that school) also called Roma dangerous and claimed they prefer stealing to working.
Orphanage Children
In 2011, I took a class at New York University School of Continuing Education about Keeping Children Healthy and Safe, where we did presentations about discipline opportunities we had experienced. I did mine about an episode in a foreign orphanage four years earlier. The orphanage stood in a field where wild descendants of housecats were as ubiquitous as squirrels are in some American neighborhoods. One day, a little boy in the orphanage grabbed a cat, punched it, and threw it roughly on the ground. I tried making him know his action was wrong.
To my surprise, the NYU teacher and a few fellow students said things like: “This class isn’t about children like him,” and “orphanage children are out of our scope.” Really? The course description implied it was about all children. The teacher and fellow students weren’t sympathetic to the cat either.
Did they consider half of the problem that the cat’s mother was not spayed and the other half of the problem that the little boy had been born? Despite the fact that it happened in a place where abortions have exceeded live births for decades?
In about 2018, I told an informal amateur writing group in upstate New York the story of the boy and the cat. I then told how the NYU class had responded to the story. And one of the group’s participants reacted, “Those Nazis!”
Political Prisoners or Criminals?
Angela Davis
Once I attended a lecture by lawyer Alan Dershowitz, where he recalled playing a role in getting American Communist Party leader Angela Davis acquitted. She had gone on trial in 1972, officially for buying guns which other people had used in a fatal courthouse raid. At that time, her allies had been calling her a political prisoner.
Then in 1979, Mr. Dershowitz continued, the Soviet Union awarded Ms. Davis the Lenin Peace Prize. As she went to Moscow to accept it, Mr. Dershowitz reported, he asked her to asker her hosts to free specific individuals imprisoned in the Soviet Union for political reasons. In response, her office told him that the Soviet Union had no political prisoners and that those people were criminals and deserved to be in prison.
The United States also has political prisoners, whom officials designate criminals. People are sentenced for non-violent pro-life activism.
Refugees
United States policy classifies some people fleeing oppression as either “political” or “economic” refugees. It considers people from “favored” countries less worthy of the label “political refugee” than those from “disfavored” countries. And it considers “political” refugees more worthy of asylum than “economic” ones.
People Society Declares Never Should Have Been Born
At first, as countries imposed abortion, they gave total amnesty to people born before the axe date. But by 1989, with the brutal aggressive overnight imposition of abortion on Romania, American media portrayed Romania’s already-born children whose mother they implied would have aborted them if they could have as if subhuman and potentially dangerous. It suggested that the fact they are alive is a crime against humanity. How have teachers, governments, potential employers, the European Union, the UN, and human rights groups treated them?
In Singapore, children born to women who have already borne two children have been denied schooling. In the 1990’s an “illegal third child,” by the time she was 24, had walked to Cambodia, spent 3 years in Spain, and finally arrived in the United States seeking asylum because in China, she was a “non-person,” “denied many rights of Chinese citizens.”2
In the US, how will public schools in abortion-promoting states treat a child showing up who was born in an abortion-restricting state after Dobbs from a pregnancy retroactively declared unworthy of carrying to term?
And what about children with “flaws” detectable before birth?
People Society Wants Dead
Disturbingly, the media, popular culture, pundits, and officials are embracing the concept that individuals in certain physical conditions need to be dead.
Under this mentality, people proclaim that “there is no abuse” in places that allow death-hastening. Do they mean that officials and authorities do not proactively suggest death-hastening for people who do not meet the MAID-recommended criteria?
But what about families, friends(?), social workers, caregivers, creditors, relatives’ creditors, insurers, nursing homes, hospices, and clergy people pressuring a person who does meet the criteria to submit to death-hastening? Claiming “this isn’t abuse, because these people need to die” (i.e., are unworthy of life) brings to mind apologists for a regime claiming that it has no political prisoners and anybody it incarcerates deserves to be locked up.
Blaming the high consumer price of medical insurance on the elderly, the disabled, the chronically ill, and the “slowly” dying encourages society to see these individuals as “our affliction.” That is one thing the Nazis called the Jews.
Praising a relative or friend for “choosing death over suffering” brings to mind Herman Goring’s endorsement of Austrian Jews committing suicide after the Anschluss.3
How will people who are declared better off dead but who refuse death hastening be treated, legally and socially? Examples of involuntary euthanasia in America and Europe could fill an essay. In a work party early this millennium, when someone brought up the topic of euthanasia, and I asked what about people who met the criteria but refused death-hastening, one of them promptly answered, “Shoot them anyway.”
When laws and treaties are meant to protect everybody, does “everybody” mean only those considered “worthy?”
REFERENCES
1. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, 2002.
2. Teresa Puente and Tribune Staff Reporters, “Bid for Asylum a Tortuous Path,” Chicago Tribune, August 2, 1998.
3. Piers Brandon, The Dark Valley. Vintage Books, 2000, p. 539.
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For more posts from Ms. Boomer-ang, see:
Political Homelessness is Better than a Wrong Political Home
“Shut Up and Enjoy it!”: Abortion Promoters who Sexually Pressure Women
The Danger of Coerced Euthanasia: Questions to Ask
Depicting Fatal Violence: A Double-Edged Sword
Asking Questions about Miscarriage and Abortion
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