Finding Inspiration in an Unfair World

By Angela Ebalo / Winter 2021

To my past self:

Life is not fair. While you are growing up protected against the evils that surround the world, there are people who are riddled with fear of impending doom. While there are endless opportunities and resources at your disposal, there are some who can barely put food on their plates. In whatever point in life you’re in, you might think that life is good, and that financial and societal struggles are brought about by laziness but it can not be any farther from the truth. Just because people have less of what you have does not mean they’re lazy and unmotivated they just don’t have the same resources as you do.

It is naive to think that blessings are equally distributed among everyone. In your own hometown, you see out of school youth, parents who can barely scrape by each day, and etc. What you don’t know is that in the future, you’d also experience these kinds of struggles. No, not exactly like theirs. But you will see why it’s difficult to ease your way through life.

I kind of want to enumerate the things to explain to you that being underprivileged is not synonymous with being lazy. First of all, the society is built to protect those who are on the top-- rich individuals, political families, and everyone related to them. Almost everything- laws, policies, housing, and the like all cater towards their own interests. Have you noticed how there are certain areas and communities that are deemed better or worse than others? That’s to segregate groups of people that may come either from different backgrounds, with different financial situations, most of the time, race is also part of the picture. Due to the unfair advantage of those on the top over the rest of the society, it has become much more difficult to compete with them for opportunities that could put the gap closer. Which, in turn, makes it hard to get out of bad environments, communities, and even situations.

Right now, me, future you, have realized that no matter how ambitious, studious, and hardworking you are, there will always be a factor, or factors that could hinder you from achieving your dreams. Internship opportunities are given to those who have more time in their hands, law school tuition increases each year, jobs are competitive and rarely pay well, and so much more. Life is hard but that does not mean you’re not trying-- it’s a systemic problem that needs to be resolved.

If you think about it, the individuals who keep the society running are those who are in the bottom of the (should be) non-existent class hierarchy. The transcontinental railroad workers back in the 1800s, the Irish factory workers, African Americans in the South, they all played an enormous role in creating the society that’s being governed only by those who have resources to control the way people live their lives. While the rest of the world is suffering post-war, there were individuals who were detached from reality and thought life was going great for everyone. This mirrors the state we are in right now-- minimum wage earners forced to work in order to survive a pandemic and at the same time, billionaires have become trillionaires through the help of those who do the grunt work to make their business possible.

However, no matter how difficult life might be, turn your own struggles, and the struggles of the individuals who come before you as inspiration to strive and use your resources to better the lives of others. It might be impossible to surpass and overturn what our leaders have started but always try and help like how the unemployed in the Bronx helped those in the same situation and came together to protest against wages, terrible working and living situations. Like white allies of the Civil Rights Movement in Selma that walked among their African American neighbors.