For years, the purpose of the government has been to maintain a strict and rigid structure in our society, this structure is used to maintain society stabilized. For the most part this political aspect of society becomes repressive, and totalitarian making it impossible for people to feel free. Many governments throughout the world use their influence and power to silence and scare those who may not support the system. Violence and fear is often used as strategies to align those who may seem as a possible threat to the national and social stability of a certain political party or agency. The most interesting aspect of politics is that when a certain part of a demography rebels against their policies they use any means possible to invalidate their perspective, and prevent their ideology from raveningly spreading to other important communities and social groups. Often times people who raise their voice, and go against the norms that are formally established by society are perceived as crazy, unstable or defiant. Defiant is a term that seem to be taken lightly by people who hear it, but the truth is that sometimes defiance is wrongly mistaken with the willingness to express one’s thoughts and sentiments about the social life we live in. This is essay will focus on how governments and public establishments often label people as “defiant” to exclude them, as a way to silence their voices as they believe they endanger and threaten the continuation of their corrupt system. When referring to the corruption of the system I will be focusing on the constant use of power, the constant use of violence of a specific system to harm those opposing it, and the constant racial and social discrimination people are suffering in the hands of our “democratic government”.
“Defiance” is a term that is often used to label people who are perceived to be an antagonizing and damaging figure, whose purpose is to block the fluidity of certain elements of our society. People who are labeled as defiant are portrayed as unstable, and in most cases, are described as crazy. A clear example is the one depicted in the essay In Praise of Defiance by Carrie Arnold. In this essay, we can see how defiance is a term used to label those who look for a change and justice in the system. In this article, Carrie Arnold gives different types of scenarios in which individuals are labeled and marginalized as a way to undermine their efforts to defend their rights. An example is given in this article when Arnold introduces the story of Holly, a young women who is a patient suffering from eating disorder.As we know in many medical intuitions that focus on treating these types of medical conditions, their main goal is to try to reinforce an eating system that helps the patient recuperate her weigh much faster. The question being raised in this essay is how much power must these intuitions have to decide the amount of food that a patient must consume? and how much power does the patient must have to decide how much food can her body resist? This is being depicted in the following statement,“Holly admitted: ‘I can’t. I’m scared. ‘But the facility didn’t see fear, it saw defiance. In her panic, Holly had pushed a nurse out of the way, which was written down as a physical assault on staff. So, the treatment center transported Holly to a locked psychiatric ward where she was held against her will for the next five days. She was restrained, drugged, and humiliated, all of which gave Holly flashbacks and nightmares.”This statement depicts the traumatizing events that followed Holly’s attempt to make her voice heard, as we can see she was in fact trying to let the staff know that her body couldn’t take the amount of food that was given to her, but the staff viewed her attempts as possible threats to the system. Holly is just one example of the many discrepancies our government, and public agencies have. As a society I truly believe we are taking major steps to a better society.
