Free Will
I am a subject to Free Will. Never mind the stares across the street that pick out your flesh. Never mind the comments of others “Go back to your country” that eat you from the inside out. Never mind the continuous hate for being “non-white”. Never mind. Never mind. Words like them where the more we use them the more their meaning is lost, Like for example Homework. A words where immediate despair and pain is erupted, but the meaning of homework is lost through its continuous use. I used those types of words like many others as ways to deflect the harmful phrases spat at people like me. Never mind. It will get better. Maybe they will change. This overcompensating feeling of hope that others will make the right choice not because they can but because they need to. Them like me are subjects to free will. But why is it that I am caged, and you are not?
Free will is the ”power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion”. “Own” a person pronoun that technically means the people who have taken their time to hear this. You, well technically. The word own is a personal pronoun that doesn’t really seem so personal when you step out of your front door. When you meet the real world, that “own”, that comfort and idealistic want to be in control of our own lives, our own paths isn’t the case anymore. “Own” a word that means everything but nothing at the same time. A word that not only represents us but our peers, our government and the ropes that are tied around our hand, our necks, holding us down, choking us. That’s what the word “own” is. A fantasy that we fall victim to. We think we have the ability to do what we want because we do those actions, but we don’t, we never did. Because if the word own was truly ours, we wouldn’t see the number of deaths we see due to misogyny, if the word own was truly ours we would see the high raises in segregation, or racism. If the word own was truly ours I would be able to walk down a street and not feel uncomfortable by my skin, my culture, my heritage.
I said before that free will was the power of acting without constraint. Stop and Search. We’ve all heard this phrase before, the police stop and search you if they suspect of something but tell me why the Ethnicity Black Other was 21 times more likely to get stop and searched between the periods of April 2020 to March 2021. Why In the metropolitical police force they stated that they had 71 stop and searches for every 1000 black people but only 17 for every white. But free will is power of acting without constraint. Even if I just walked to steps down the street; all eyes are googling me. Sometimes you won’t admit it, sometimes it’s not even their eyes, it’s their mind instead you can feel them, the stares, the judgement, the voices in their head cling, injecting their way into yours. “You don’t belong here”, “This is my country”. But I have free will so I have the right to live in this country, or can I? To answer this question, let’s turn back the clock to 2018, The Hate You Give. The film finally came out. Not only did we see with our eyes but hear with our ears the truth that so many shut out. You don’t have free will unless, your white, a man, heterosexual, and fit the agendas of the world, never being too far left or too far right and if your all 4. well life’s sorted for you then. But if you’re not, be prepared because free will won’t be so free anymore.
The Hate You Give was a book to film adaptation which highlighted the racist discriminatory behavior not only in the police but in our partners, our teachers and the people we trust the most. It showed how a simple hairbrush, could be mistaken for a weapon. A weapon, the same hair brushed used to perfect hair is a weapon. So what, they should stop taking it to school because that, contradicts free will. They no longer have the power to act without constraint because the police prefer to rush and not figure out if they actually are a threat. They prefer to use guns than to use brains. I recently got shown a video by my mother, it was a black boy only of the age 12 in this Uk, that calls itself free being handcuffed and taken to floor with excessive force all because he looked like the robbers that robbed the convenience store. Now who I am I to say what that boy is like in his everyday life, we don’t know people but on a 12-year-old excessive force is used, no care for injuries or if he was uncomfortable. Now that is a break of free will, a young boy back from school. He didn’t even make it home. Now I ask you, Do you still think you have free will? Even when there were 646,292 arrests between April 2020 and March 2021 – over 30,000 fewer than the previous year, black people were over 3 times as likely to be arrested as white people – there were 29 arrests for every 1,000 black people, and 9 arrests for every 1,000 white people black men were over 3 times as likely to be arrested as white men – there were 54 arrests for every 1,000 black men, and 15 arrests for every 1,000 white men.
Or even how men were 6 times likely to be arrested than women. Some people call it aggression. I call it society. We all have a little aggression inside of us but its where we grow up, who we grow with, what the ideologies of our society are that affect our emotional capacity. Now, that is not an excuse to say that they don’t deserve to be arrested if it was for a serious crime. But things like aggression and anger apply to everyone and to say that it is a cause of a majority crime proves how society indoctrinated sickness from the root. It is as if we need criminals and prisons to warn others. Another break of free will, as they are some people who are so manipulated by their own wants, needs and societies schemes that they don’t realise that their “power” to make choices was never theirs, it was the governments.
How we as a female school put our “trust” into a conservative party when only 25% percent are female or how 35% of the house of commons are woman. Now some people would say, how does that have anything to do with free will, maybe they choose not to be in parliament, I mean not every woman needs to join our government. Believe me, I get that, but that’s not what I was talking about. I wasn’t talking about the women who didn’t want to be in the government in the first place. I’m talking about the countless times a women’s opinion have been left to the side, because I mean just because they got the job doesn’t mean they reap the benefits. Or how about gender pay gaps. In 2020, the gap was 14.9 % between men and women, its lowest ever. But slowly, despite efforts it has creeped back up to 15.4 % as of 2021. The lacking credentials in money leads to homelessness, poverty, sickness and disease. Single moms, Single parents, Siblings who are working extra pay because money is tight, pay gaps are the turning point between health and death, between living comfortably and living in stress everywhere you go.
But we can’t control that, you can’t control that, I can’t control that, well at least that’s what I’ve been told. Countless times, it’s out of my reach. Al I can do is hope for something better, a third option. But I never fully understood the power I have, the power we have with our free will. We can stand to the government that clearly don’t care about us. We can stand to ourselves and that self-hope we bath in a bit too much. So why don’t we? Why don’t we stand to the things that pull us down? The ropes that choke us, strangle are necks can’t you see them grow, weave around your body, strings pulling you up, you’re a puppet, degraded from the once puppet master, we fall into a hole of no return. Just descend. Descending till we see that white light, descending till we hear our ancestors’ whispers tickle our ears. Descending till we realize we spent our whole life with a fantasy, of free will because it very much isn’t free. Not for you and not for me. Why do we fight for justice? Why do we fight for freedom when the chain we form as students are from ourselves. That’s why they grown, why they cover us whole, swallow us, drown us because we as young children blind ourselves from the truth. The truth that we aren’t free, not here, not outside your home, nowhere.
I was a subject to free will, that word never mind that I shall never use again. Free will has a cost and a great one and that. But this is my opinion, what’s yours?