Not Animalian

Many people might believe that they are just animalian at the core; that without civil constraint, they will always fall back on a much more barbaric nature. But, in reality, people do not have to see life that way. People may be skeptical of achieving idealism in a sector of their life, but the truth is that every person wants the same conditions as every one else: harmony, peace, understanding, and compassion. The central idea, here, is community. Humans need community, because without it, humans are lost.

Urban regeneration is pulling up roots, inevitably, wreaking internal havoc in the sense that the physical displacement of ethnic groups is causing confusion and disorder. Personal identities are a haze and various symptoms that arise from such an unknown are infecting fear, insecurity, and anxiety in American homes thought to be well established. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, in a trite passage titled The Hidden Injuries of Class, demonstrate this lack of acceptance of a “lower” working class. One may strongly agree, though, that this tension between the laboring, manual workers and the New Class is the fuel that drives the economy forward, making progress, at least in terms of creating new products. However, in many of the readings that were assigned in the class Introduction to Planning, Policy, and Public Health, the social evil of blaming others, or a small group of people, for the cancerous problem that it has become is evident, still, in this reading. The interviewers, the interviewees, the compartments of social class, that’s boundaries are melting away in the midst of technology today, are all, collectively, accountable for each other. People hope, largely encouraged by capitalism, that their evils will be buried in the masses, but that their hard work will earn them accolade. However, they are greatly disillusioned by magic if they think that problems can disappear without true reconciliation. The problem is passed along, whether it is between classes or between generations, and they usually accumulate more noticeably in the oppressed. The Hidden Injuries of Class illuminates a clear manifestation of this accumulation, the carelessness and lies that plague Americans as a result of pride, self-justification, or the like. For the first time in a new age of America, social evils are spilling over the rim where the slightest mishap travels as fast as the eye can see and is felt as obstructive as a cork in the hole. The overwhelming feeling of paralysis or stagnancy is dealt with by denial or depression, and even if a few jewels of a leader are found to be embracing the tumultuous snowballing of a problem, Americans are found picking up the pieces, struggling to produce, once again, an ideal state. The issue at hand, however, is not a particular class or social group, but an attitude of giving up. In other words, people are obviously bitter and resentful for such a chaotic time as this, but their pessimism is not helping. Their belief that the core of a human being is to be ravenous is not only indignant of itself, but also self-destructive. Maybe people want to end their lives for their belief of a lack of hope, but what then is made of a prevailing desire to see improvements? What is the self in control of more than the self?

The hostility in the world is present, but evil can and is overcome with good. Pursuing individual knowledge is a noble goal, but only as a tool for nurturing society, not in the way of personal gain, but personal fulfillment in seeing others benefit from one’s own work. True satisfaction is not isolating oneself to become the best, but reconciling with the community a ground for cooperative engagement in idealism, or the pursuit of relinquishing evil for good.