Opinion
“If you always think what you always thought, you'll always do what you always did and you'll always get what you always got, and think what you always thought.” – Anonymous
It was a moment of silence for me – the pen swooping swiftly across the paper – equal pay for equal work. It seems so simple and equitable like the lessons we were taught in primary school.
The day President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law on Jan. 29, I sat with eyes fixed to the television on CNN.
The passage of the bill means that women can challenge unequal pay.
A woman with cropped blond hair and librarian-style glasses told of her plight in a voice that sounded like that of the Coal Miner’s Daughter.
Lilly Ledbetter was employed as a supervisor at Goodyear Tire & Rubber plant in Gadsden, Ala. from 1979 to 1998.
She worked as an area manager for most of her career. The majority of people in her position were men.
At first her salary paralleled the salaries of the men performing substantially similar work. Over time Ledbetter’s pay stagnated compared to the pay of male area managers who had the same or even less seniority.
At the end of 1997 she was the only woman in the position of area manager and the pay discrepancy was blatantly obvious. Ledbetter was paid $3,727 per month while the lowest-paid male area manager received $4,286 and the highest paid received $5,236 per month.
The act addresses fairness and equality in an era of desperation.
It also makes the statement that maybe the best man for the job is not always a man.
I’m not touting womanpower, just human power and basic human rights.
It’s simple. It’s like picking a bushel of apples, or in Lake County, pears. If a man and a woman both contribute the same amount, why would the man walk away with more pieces of gold?
According the National Women’s Law Center, the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act reverses the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in 2007 and restores the ability of victims of wage discrimination to hold their employers accountable for injustice and challenge the practice in court.
“This is truly a monumental achievement for women – and all workers. The Supreme Court stripped workers of their ability to fight wage discrimination but now a new president and Congress have stepped in and restored their basic legal rights,” said Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center. “Employers will now be held accountable for each discriminatorily reduced paycheck, because every time pay is unfairly lowered, it’s a violation of the law and fundamental fairness.”
It takes perseverance and patience to fight the good fight or envision the big picture as Ledbetter learned in her experience, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., 550 U.S. 618 (2007), U.S. Supreme Court.
When I consider equality for women, I often look to famed sociologist, philosopher, feminist and author, Mary Wollstonecraft, born in 1797, an avid advocate of independence and education for women.
During an unlikely era she stood firm about the importance of self-discipline, honesty, frugality and social contentment. She placed the responsibility of sensibility, economics and political theory on women while fully appreciating the role of motherhood. She died from complications associated with childbirth when her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of “Frankenstein,” was born.
In the spirit of strong women, strong humans, Ledbetter stood in front of a crowd in Washington DC, her image on the televisions of many millions, proving that we all have a voice.
The world is tumultuous at best now. The simple act promoting civilized and fair behavior provided some respite from the cold winds of war, poverty and overwhelming hopelessness.
Mandy Feder is an award-winning writer and editor who now joins Lake County News as a columnist and contributor.
{mos_sb_discuss:4}
- Details
- Written by: Lake County News Reports
Thirty years later, and having lived for a significant amount of time in a total of three very different nations, I think I may have come to know the meaning of such stress.
Stress is a mental experience, that affects the body and the emotions, but that does not necessarily have to do with actual outer circumstances or events, rather it is often rooted in specific beliefs and perceptions. It is how we handle life that causes us to be stressed, rather than life itself, most of the time.
Life here seems to be handled with high expectations, standards of perfections that are not seen in too many other cultures, that are often deemed to be “substandard” by Americans. Even Europeans are looked upon with some disdain for having supposedly lower standards in some aspects of their lives. Some environmental causes are met with the comment: ”So you want us to live like Europeans?” as if Europeans still lived in the dark ages.
The flip side of this pursuit of materialistic happiness, which goes with the pursuit of superficial perfection, is stress, as nothing is ever good enough, and no one can ever be satisfied with what they have, they consistently want more, bigger, louder, brighter, faster. Even food has to be large, and as it gets bigger, shinier and more perfect, like plastic, it looses its content, with almost no nutrition.
So this plastic culture focuses almost entirely on appearances. Damn the content, worship the superficial. People eat perfect-looking empty or chemical food, they elect individuals who “look presidential” and are clueless or have no integrity or character, they watch mind-numbing movies and flashy news and entertainment, they live in huge houses made of cardboard, and they attempt to look and act as if they were still 20 in their 40s, with fake body parts whenever they can afford them.
Indeed the struggle to appear perfect also targets physical appearances and personal lives. People don’t just want perfect trappings; they want perfect lives, some according to Hallmark ideals in the domain of relationships. They also want perfect bodies, women still being generally pressured to strive to look like the 16-year-old anorexic models who fill the pages of popular magazines.
Happiness must also be perfect, and anyone who feels sadness or grief, or anything even slightly negative, better get over it quickly and according to some predetermined and orderly steps defined by the experts, or else it is concluded that there is something wrong with them and that they need psychotropic medications, which are given to the public by doctors like candy these days.
Normal anger is not tolerated, but violence is, and pervades society precisely because people are taught to bottle up their everyday anger and frustrations, to control their behaviors and suppress their feelings, until they go postal or psycho, or implode in depression. So while no one should ever express normal, rational anger or pain, everyone better have a gun and some medication, as fear and paranoia become rampant.
Children are not immune from a pressure to perform, to excel, and to compete madly, the latest being that toddlers can be taught to read. Perhaps they will be made to have read Shakespeare and Homer and do calculus by the age of two … after all, you can never induce a person to aim for the best too early, or so it is believed.
What is lost in this process of striving for superficial perfection and performance? Some American tourists made a comment, while visiting Venice, reputed to be one of the most romantic cities in the world … they said it wasn’t bad, but it needed a coat of paint. They were apparently oblivious to the soul of the place, and wanted it to look like Las Vegas.
Soul, heart, poetry, charm, substance, meaning, authenticity, these things are lost, in people as well as the outer environment, when outer perfection is sought with such neurotic determination. There is definitively a huge yet unconscious hunger for these attributes in America today, as can be seen in the current trend of “distressed” furniture which people with so called disposable income and some sophistication like to acquire, looking for some traces of soul in their decor. Because this hunger is unconscious, the attempt to restore “soul” in everyday life is indeed feeble and superficial, and as everything else commercially exploited.
The poetic dimension of life, so crucial to the soul, that without it withers and dies, is severely lacking in this speedy plastic and concrete “perfect” American culture, so seemingly practical and materialistic yet without respect for actual matter, without much respect or love for land, water and air, and so fundamentally alien to nature, as can be witnessed when, traveling by air, perfectly straight lines and square angles are seen to define cities and impose their very odd, unnatural order on curvy, naturally wiggly hills and valleys.
What is also lost here, and the source of the most intense stress in the final analysis, is self-acceptance. High standards mean relentless self-criticism, each one of us being trained to be our very own “coach,” beating and whipping ourselves into guilt and ever greater demands to become better in all areas of our lives, not from natural growth and inner inspiration, as should happen given some care, trust, and natural time, but by trying to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps.
Mistakes are frowned upon and learning time and performances are condensed to the speed of light. Those who fail or appear to give up are pariahs, akin to lepers … they are “losers.” It is ironically believed that there is something seriously wrong with those individuals who do not have the drive to relentlessly struggle to better their lives according to other people’s standards, and almost everyone is conditioned to want it and want it yesterday … from the hurried business executive to the spiritual seeker demanding instant enlightenment.
For these very reasons, because growth does not happen naturally and on its own terms, from the inside out (there is no time to live, only time to race through life, to get and perform rather than be), people who forcefully achieve the goals society teaches them to seek frequently end up feeling fake, and have an occasional “identity crisis,” as their outer life does not match their inner life.
Yet most do not experience such necessary redemption, they simply navigate unaware on the edge of meaninglessness and despair, attempting to function while quickly pursuing what is called happiness with ever more and better stuff, ever more effective medications, greater and madder sources of entertainments and escapes, and a belief that if they could only reach the epitome of what they think is perfection in one aspect of their lives or another, they would be satisfied at last, they would feel worthy and could rest on their achievements for an instant … until artificial standards are raised again, and a new race begins, and the gerbil is back running in the wheel inside his/her mental cage, going absolutely nowhere with great speed and impressive determination.
Raphael Montoliu lives in Lakeport.
{mos_sb_discuss:4}
- Details
How to resolve AdBlock issue?