Economic Struggles: My Views and Solutions
As a 10th grader, my definition of social justice would be that it is the idea which describes human societies where everyone deserves and shares equal economic, social, and political power and rights. Social justice can be taken further to express a state where all members are exposed to the equal access of opportunities and receive fair treatment regardless of their background, status, or role in society. However, achieving social justice has been a great goal for humanity to work towards from the beginning, our world is nowhere close to being perfect and since then humanity has been dealing with social injustice issues. From my point of view, one of the most salient aspects of social injustices are economic injustices, which are results of economic inequalities such as poverty and enlarging wealth gap within a society. According to Wealthy Distribution in the United States in the First Quarter of 2024, published by Statista Research Department, “in the United States, the lower 50% of earners only hold around 2.5% of the nation’s total wealth, on the other hand, the top 10% of earners own around 67% of the whole nation’s wealth.” From this statistic alone we could see the extreme imbalance of wealth. Social injustice and inequality is the main root cause of some of the most urgent problems such as high frequent rate of criminal activities, inadequate health care system, and poor education system. Social justice issues have also impacted me and my perceptions on the world around us. Although I do not have much experience with these specific issues, nevertheless, I still acknowledge that these are very urgent issues impacting my community that I learned from the internet and from people around me.
Economic injustices around me had made me realize that problems that came with it are such issues that are extremely harmful to members of society yet it's so encompassed in their daily lives. Issues of social injustice pose a great social injustice problem that can be seen in its impact in our education system. The unequal distribution of resources in our education system leads to students of different areas exposing themselves to different opportunities to carry on their education journey. This situation can be alleviated significantly by donation of teaching resources such as books and smartboards, while hiring well-trained teachers and staff. From my personal experience as a volunteer math tutor for elementary students, the school I helped at doesn’t have sufficient and equal teaching resources compared to other schools. According to my experience, most of the children there possess very little interest in mathematics and it was very frustrating in the process of trying to help them. This can be proposed as the main factor of a student's deficiency in their understanding of mathematics. This social injustice issue of the unequal distribution of resources is impacting children's education in a negative light across the nation and across the world.
The unequal distribution of wealth within the different classes of people sparks a high crime rate when those who possess less wealth are exposed to fewer opportunities for employment. Facing survival issues, or an increase in desperation to become rich is one of the main causes of crimes. From my experience living in Philadelphia and my hearings from other parts of the world, regions with a larger wealth gap between the rich and poor have the tendency to come with more frequent criminal activities. Philadelphia had been well-known across the world as a city filled with poverty and crime. For instance, whenever I pass by certain regions of Philadelphia, I would see people who I can clearly tell that they are not living comfortably in the filthy streets. Achieving the access of steady employment opportunities can significantly reduce the need for members within a community to commit criminal activities. Overall, it is due to the unequal distribution of wealth between different people that forms lower classes had to commit crimes for survival matter.
Another aspect of achieving social justice is having an universal , quality, economically friendly healthcare system for all in need. However, economic inequality and deficiency puts a financial burden on millions of families who are unable to afford the expensive healthcare system in the U.S. The failure to provide equal opportunities for those who could and couldn’t afford medical insurance remains a major social injustice issue today, especially in the U.S. Hearing that millions of people are in need but lacking access to medical services made me realize that a healthcare system is an extremely important and urgent aspect for our human rights. We could improve our healthcare system by advocating for reform policies that restructure the system to make health insurance more affordable.
In a literary work I read in the past, A Raisin in the Sun, the Walter family had to deal with problems and challenges of economic inequality and injustice. One common theme that revolved around the Walter family in the story was their struggle for money and their economic status. Money was the drive for the dreams of many characters and started conflicts between each other. The family lived in poverty in the Chicago South Side. They were always in need of money and were “chained” from chasing their dreams and not being able to live their envisioned life due to their financial situation. For one particular example, a character named Beneatha had a dream of pursuing further education, however, she’d overcome and struggle much for money. From this we could see that people can reach for opportunities easier than others and for some, those opportunities are as hard to reach as ever, depending on their economic status. Examples like Beneatha shaped my perception of the world that our world is a harsh place and different people struggle to achieve what is important to them. As you can see, A Raisin in the Sun demonstrated how economic status can influence people’s life course.
In conclusion, our current world is far from perfect in achieving social justice. Although other superficial and underlying social injustices exist and are just as important, economic injustice is a great issue we are currently and have been dealing with. Economic injustice and inequality poses a great threat to the daily lives of people in our community and across the world, it is the main cause of several serious issues, including high crime rate, inefficient and expensive health care, and imbalance among education systems. In order to reduce crime rate, we must work towards increasing the access of employment for everyone. To ensure an equal opportunity of receiving education with quality, we should donate to areas with less access to teaching resources and hire well-trained faculty. As for making our healthcare system more accessible to all, we should advocate for policy reforms that make the access of medical insurance even easier. There are many actions we could take to truly solve or at least undermine issues that our society is suffering through and make an impact in our world to make it a better place.
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