Talk About People Instead
Almost every claim of valuing something that we commonly make has been and is being physically undone by a baseline/border error in our universal family planning policies, and the constant violations of the Children’s Convention it causes.
The error makes our political systems fundamentally unjust. The error also makes claims misleading, converting empowering democratic relations that limit and decentralize power into exploitative commercial ones that do the opposite.
Pressing claimants to account for the actual people in their claims – to stop abstracting – demonstrates this. Ask anyone making a policy claim to account for the minimum levels of welfare, equity, restored ecology, and effective democratic voice, they are ensuring for the people – and the future majority that would be impacted by – their claim. If they cannot account for these basic values, they are not making a morally coherent claim.
No political system is legitimate, and capable of creating political obligation, if it is not empowering and liberating the future majority equally. We begin doing that by paying the costs the baseline error externalized on women and children, and on participatory democracy, in the form of family planning incentives/entitlements/reparations that physically constitute just communities – limiting and decentralizing power so that we are preparing people for town halls rather than shopping malls.
Many are already moving in that direction with the most effective reforms possible, and choosing not to be part of an unjust, or preconstitutional and anthropocentric, system that exploits rather than invests in kids.
TAKE ACTION: THERE ARE DOZENS OF WAYS TO HELP BEND THE ARC OF WHO WE ARE TOWARDS JUSTICE.