The World’s Greatest Untapped Resource

“There’s a natural resource that exists everywhere on the planet that could improve conditions and help end poverty…yet it’s been largely ignored.”

Find out what it is here…then continue below the fold.

I saw this commercial last night and found it incredibly moving (not to mention effective), so perfectly encapsulating in such a small space the notion that, more pointedly than perhaps any other, separates progressives from conservatives—equality enriches us all.

A woman who is not free to choose her destiny—who has no control over her health, her reproduction, her education—suffers as an individual, which we all understand, but it is the larger picture of millions and millions of women denied those freedoms—hence culminating in an almost incomprehensible level of unrealized potential—that is rarely addressed.

Oppression is a useful tool to those who themselves are oppressed; a man who is detained in his dire conditions by the stranglehold of poverty may find some solace in exacting dominion over women, or minorities, or gays. Like a bullied child who turns into a bully, he masks his feelings of despair and helplessness by exacting brute authority over anyone weaker, anyone he can find to submit to his diminished but determined will.

As long as I am stronger than someone, it means I am not weak.

Likewise, it a useful tool to those who fear losing their status, who know they have come by their prosperity and opportunities through no endeavor of their own, but a fortunate twist of fate. Such enviable circumstances being nothing more than a happy accident can burden their benefactors with wracking anxiety, driving them in desperation to fashion a means of control—and, finding they cannot will guarantees against loss into existence, they instead create barriers against gain for others, as if life is a zero-sum game.

If another man becomes rich, someone will have to become poor, and it isn’t going to me, by god.

The desire to oppress is too useful to too many people for it to magically disappear out of the goodness of hearts. There will always be bad hearts with bad intentions. Eradicating oppression of the magnitude it now exists around the globe is contingent upon empowering the oppressed communities—giving them the chances they are denied and telling them they have the right to take them. And that depends on our collective willingness to, well, CARE. What would it mean for us all if every person who wanted to get an education…could? What would it mean for us all if every person who wanted to work on ending poverty, negotiating peace, curing diseases…did? What would this world look like if everyone had the ability to live up to her or his potential?

Equality enriches us all.

(Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)