Equality

Write a poem inspired by this word: EQUALITY

I remember reading the book, Animal Farm,
long before I'd ever heard of Martin Luther King, Jr.
There's a line in the book that said:
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
I remember being nine and that line confusing me.

I knew the pigs were a metaphor for men,
I understood that. Then I realized
that what it meant was that some men (or pigs or geese)
were more equal than others.
All people were equal, weren't they?

I grew up in the fifties. The only black people
I'd ever met were friends of my parents from St. Croix.
They were just like us, weren't they?
The one friend had skin the color of a gorgeous tan,
the other band member had skin like shiny coal.

Were they different? How? It didn't make sense to me.
People were people, weren't they?
I remembered getting an A on my book report.
In it, I said that I didn't think our world was like that.
But then, the book was fiction, right?

When I joined the U.S. Army in 1976,
I was one of three women in my company who were white.
Initially, I didn't think anything of it. People were people,
weren't they? A best friend from camp had been Asian.
Sarina, a girl from college was from Nairobi.

They'd been my friends. Color never entered the equation.
Two weeks into boot camp, I'd ended up with the cord
to my hot iron wrapped around my throat because
I'd asked two girls in my barracks to wait to use my iron
until I'd finished using it. I was accused of being racist.

My drill sergeant said this was the Army. He said
there was no color in his Army before I was told to drop
and give him 50. They were not. I remembered thinking
that maybe there was: Light green and dark green.
Maybe I'd been wrong all along.

I ended up becoming friends with those two girls.
We rocked our final exam when we had to capture the flag.
The flag held by our drill sergeant.
The three of us tied his hands behind his back
and put him in the foxhole. We won.

Time moved on. I grew to realize that all people
were not considered equal. It still made no sense to me.
Why not? I learned that all people seemed to look
at skin color as a defining attribute rather than genetics.
Well, the majority of people.

I thought that majority was wrong. I didn't judge
people by how they looked, but by how they treated others.
Then I learned to look deeper and find out the 'why.'
It still made no sense to me. In that, it turned out
I was the minority.

In time, I learned that some folks were indeed
'more equal than others.' And that equal-ness
depended upon who was looking at whom.
I looked deeper at the whys. I still
didn't really understand. But I understood a little more.

And I understood that there would never really be
a 'true equality' because people always seem
to want to one-up the other guy. That they seem to need
to be better than someone. Anyone.
That continues to make no sense to me.

Be nice to me; I'll be nice to you.
It doesn't matter if we disagree on something.
We can agree to disagree without the world ending.
Perhaps I'm naive. Perhaps not. And perhaps
it seems as if the world and life are hard enough.

So we should get along and be kind. Trying to see
and understand another's viewpoint. Trying to give
the benefit of the doubt. Trying. Simply trying.
Actions have always spoken louder than words.
Perhaps it is time for a lot of actions and words to change.