Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
There's a movement that insists that we are all beautiful. That people disfigured by accidents and disease are just as beautiful as supermodels. Which, sure, beauty is subjective. Beauty is whatever beauty is to you.
The message underlying a lot of these campaigns doesn't sit well with me.
Why do we care who's beautiful or not?
Because we tie beauty with worth.
We're taught this from a young age. You've heard the examples: Disney villains are always disfigured. The "ugly laws" in the US.
As a girl growing up in the US, I was taught that I owed it to other people to look "presentable." That no one would love me or even want to be my friend if I didn't look a certain way. As a weird, gross, tomboy who refused to play the game, I didn't realize how much I'd internalized that message until pretty recently.
I don't care who's beautiful or not. Everyone is worthy.
PS. Police brutality isn't a new thing. The new thing is that 40 million Americans are unemployed and thus ready to go march in the streets.
Instances of racist police harassment make the news often enough that I have two "favorite" examples of the absurdity of policing in the US: one of the gangs in Brooklyn lawyered up and started making money off the NYPD and that guy who kept getting arrested for showing up to work.
I have to admit that I didn't stop calling the police out of concern for my neighbors safety. I stopped calling the police after finding out from personal experience that it doesn't help anything, even in clear-cut call the cops sort of situations, like a total stranger committing an unprovoked act of violence.
The personal values and ethics of individual police officers is irrelevant, because the overall impact the police have is obvious. There's very little data supporting the efficacy of policing, but it's clear that policing in the US has a deeply harmful impact on certain categories of people, most notably Black people.
More people survive police brutality than die from it. Quite a few survivors of police violence require care because of the experience. Then there are the people who are disabled by the experience of incarceration.
Yet I've never encountered their family caregivers in any caregiver support programs.
That's the ultimate proof that as much as we've tried to create a radically welcoming space, we have a lot of work to do.