“No matter how big a nation is, it is no stronger that its weakest people, and as long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you might otherwise.”
-Marian Anderson
The chain is no stronger than its weakest link. Our national (for me global chain, you know I’m not fond of borders) chain is full of ‘weakest links,’ those who are keeping people down, and by doing so are denying themselves their own flight into true freedom. Some I consider to be in this category (but great news! If they stop doing it, they return to shiny, unbreakable forged steel immediately):
Anyone who still uses the antiquated and antipathethic “they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps” pontification. The people they’re talking about don’t have bootstraps, or boots, or the means to acquire them. Anyway, they don’t need boots so much as compassion.
*Try buying boots when you’re followed and given the evil eye the second you walk into a store.
*Try buying boots with the food stamps you’ve been forced to use because you left an abusive husband and brought 4 kids and a cat with you and you’re all sleeping on a cousin’s screened porch.
*Try buying boots when you’re ashamed to go into the store in your unwashed clothes -can’t do laundry because you don’t have running water.
*Try getting a job to buy boots when you don’t have clothes to wear to the interview.
*Try buying boots when no one in the store will talk to you because you are clearly homeless and as such you are assumed to be schizophrenic or alcoholic, or both, but you’re just another college-educated victim of the sub-prime fiasco and lost your home.
"...but I'm not the only one..." 