I’ve always considered myself an aspiring world-builder. But the world I wanted to build centered around me racing to the top of the world, and then changing it. As the summer progresses, I’m learning more and more how convoluted this idea truly is. I’m starting to realize that competing within these manufactured structures to secure my own position in the system is simply playing into its hands. Now, I’m trying to reframe what changing the world should look like.

E Pluribus Unum

Noun

• Out of many, one

This term, credited to the Roman writer, Cicero, is said to be about our friends and family. When we connect with and love our family and friends, we make one person out of the many we surround ourselves with. No one can survive alone… and there are many who are crucial to every step of each of our journeys.

This term has been important to the history of the US – where it has been an unofficial motto of our country since the Thirteen Colonies joined together under one nation. But I’m coming to realize that we have lost the sense of this term, and what it truly implores us to do. I think that we don’t understand that every action we take, the words we speak, the activities we engage in are part of a larger structure.

• Every item of clothing I buy allows me to support the network of global capitalism that then destabilizes less developed countries and causes their women to come to the US to do life long, laborious domestic work simply to provide a just education for their children.
• Every time I assume my heteronormativity as the norm in conversation, I uphold the idea that sexuality and gender on a spectrum is an inferior position to hold.
• Every time I have done something risky and gotten away with it because I am a “non-threatening, model minority” I have taken advantage of my position designated to me that subdues other minorities as being less acceptable.
• Every step I take to advancing my career at a high position will allow these systems to exist and continue their oppression.

I think E pluribus unum captures the sentiment of how our society was supposed to be built. If we truly think of ourselves as connected to each other to the extent that we all contribute to the networks that create the systems of oppression around us, we would be much more deeply troubled by it – and be more driven to reform these systems. We shouldn’t need to hear the stories of individual people and empathize directly with their problems to know that we are complicit and benefitting off of the labor and oppression of those around us and under us. When we start to accept that we are parts of a whole, and that the subjugation of any one part is detrimental to the whole – we will need no other motivation to seek change.

I look around at the people in my life and realize that I would be nothing without them. My parents, my dearest friends, and my fellow Moxies – they are each a crucial part of my own journey. But even more so, those who I may not directly connect with, see, or talk to. These people have all allowed me to live the amazing life I have had the privilege of living. How could I not want to make sure that their lives are just and fair?

Climbing my way to the top of these systems is not something I necessarily desire anymore. Not only does this perpetuate them, but it requires minorities to victimize themselves to gain any empathy and the support of those held above them. Instead, I’m working on not thinking so individualistically and taking steps to stop condoning and preserving the systems around us by keeping in mind that we are always: out of many, one.