categorically speaking

a nation of individuals. if the founding fathers had the foresight, or more ironically the freedom, to frame the constitution in such a way as to grant everyone equal rights and equal footing from the get go would america have evolved into a place where individuality and individual struggle is so prized? i mean really. if there was no way for someone to start off with rags we wouldnt have rags to riches stories. if there was no way for someone to become obscenely wealthy we wouldnt have rags to riches stories either. we wouldnt have to be african american and asian american on our applications. we wouldnt have to have affirmative action. or title IX. or direct lending. or private and public schools. or luxury cars. or black cards. not to say that everyone would be happy. i mean those rags to riches stories are at heart unhappiness to happiness stories anyway, right?

but they didnt look out for everyone. there were categories. unintentionally but definitely, painfully, woven into the document were categories and classes. White land holding males and everyone else. The flow of change has been a small and unsteady stream. Partly, I think, because the people with the power to make the changes has perennially been the people who felt protected by the document. So in order to get added to the deal you had to raise yourself as a category that the pen holders could recognize as real. Because I mean, from the outset there was one category and then there was everyone else who was considered more asset than person. Only persons can be categories, seems to be the only rule. But what a person is, has been debateable up until 1960.

buuuut i digress... what was not considered was that by producing that first category it implied a second category. everyone else. the set of everything that is not contained in the set of white land holding males. its human nature i guess to define yourself... and in a country where suppression, where protecting whats yours is so important (i mean thats why the war started in the first place right?) no unified action was possible. everyone else couldnt join the constitution as a group because the set, the category, had its implied sub sets based on protecting "whats yours." The sub set of females excluded from white land holding males contains the sub set of slaves and free women. to gain the most leverage in their efforts to protect what was theirs the sub set of free women couldnt be burdened with the slave women. you can regroup the sets however you like but it boils down to protecting what was yours as easily as possible. if the sub set of everyone else tried to take unified action it would have been impossible for the sheer amount of difficulty.

so the sub sets... the categories within categories have floated up as they could like bubbles through tar to reach the surface where they would be able to protect what was theirs fully and capably. as they bubble up, the main set of everyone else becomes more and more fractured. the sub sets become more and more apparent and less implied. white land holding men, women who are not slaves, black men who live above the mason dixon line, black men below the mason dixon line, women in general, people who are handicapped, people who are mentally handicapped, people who are physically handicapped, people who make less than 12,000 dollars, people who make more than 150,000, people who are immigrants, people who are the children of immigrants but born in u.s. territory, people who are immigrants but have lived in the states for 7 years, people who are homosexual, homosexuals that want to be married, homosexuals that want to adopt, people that want to adopt but arent married, people who smoke, people who have smoked in the last 6 years but want health insurance, white collar convicts, sexual deviants, sexual deviants who have molested children but not with their genitals, and on and on.

every categories addition took so long because all the categories before had to protect what was theirs to a degree they could be comfortable with. i dont want them infringing on whats mine. what ive earned (earning in the sense that the feeling of having earned something is a percieved notion unique to every person. a trust fund kid probably feels like he's "earned" what he has as much as the guy who finally made manager at mcdonalds feels like he's "earned" what he has). and its not wrong. its how it was constructed to work in the first place. and we all know it works in the sense that a machine runs. but for what purpose. but anyway im rambling. categories.