credit – neopeopleism

Today’s WP Daily Prompt – ‘No Fair.’

Fairness might well be the biggest value by which I live. When my kids were young, I early learned that they had different needs. What worked for one might not work for the other. That doesn’t feel ‘fair’ sometimes.

But the ‘no fair’ I am steaming about today is far scarier and morally wrong. It is the kind of unfair that lurks behind cronyism, currying favor with those in control for personal reasons. It is the kind of unfair that supports a woman’s groundless accusations when the accused is an upright, hard-working man of unshakeable moral integrity.

I honestly do not know which roils my blood more: the fact that any human being would systematically and maliciously go out of her way to malign another person; or that her accusation carries any weight at all. Clearly the case under my skin concerns cronyism at its most cowardly. How is it possible to credit her charge while ignoring her history of unreliability, ineffectiveness, rudeness and favoritism? [If you answer – ‘because she is a woman’ – I will choke. This is the most vile of all to me: the woman who uses that fact to a purely selfish end.]

The answer of course lies in systems which promote to the level of incompetence; which favor inside networks; which do not actually have as their goal a team approach to problem-solving for the greater good. Rhetoric aside, such systems put individual gain over community good. Which bumps up hard against my second biggest value -community.

The solution? Would that there were a single one! But if we’re talking fairness, at the minimum we need to inhabit a broader systems view. We need to take context into account. We need to be accountable for the work entrusted to us, the lives under our care. We need to listen with our hearts to hear the truth. And we must cease the betrayal of human by human. We are all here, together, now. Let’s drop our scrapping egos. In the end, much of life is ‘not fair.’ But we can get through it easier, and better, working together.