Numbers

Every citizen of the United States is just a number in this country. From the day Social Security numbers were introduced, our government has attached an arbitrary number to identify us. Almost every aspect of this country is based on percentages, statistics, and figures. Schools, testing, college acceptances, finance, careers, and so much more. Numbers. They’re everywhere, and sometimes it seems like you just can’t get away from them.

Reducing a person to a number is one of the worst forms of dehumanization. To make someone nothing more than a series of digits blinking on a screen or scrawled on a piece of paper is  one of the cruelest, most vile methods of erasing a human being’s personal identity.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what our society is doing to the  children of today’s generation. Colleges are accepting and declining students based on a furtive glance on their application. Bright, intelligent children are failing classes based solely on a percentage.

Our entire system of public education is skewed. We have all been prepared, like robots, to fill in the empty spots that appear in the job industry. Many have dreams that will never be fulfilled, jobs they can never have just because there aren’t enough spots or opportunities, or because they let sheer numbers (starting salary, severance packages) reign their future.

It appears to many that the form of education here in the United States is open for anyone and everyone, but in reality, it isn’t. Once numbers are taken into account, students can be restricted from participating in programs, attending classes, and seeking further education just because they don’t have the right amount of money or the right test score. Continuing on this destructive path will only harm the future of the human race.

We are slowly losing independence to the rising amount of figures in our lives. Our current generation is consumed with seemingly irrelevant numbers: Instagram followers, Twitter retweets, friends on Snapchat and so much more. How we perceive ourselves, in terms of beauty and social acceptance has changed dramatically over the years and displays the increasing reliance on numbers to determine our place in society.By obsessing over these numbers, we are missing out on so many aspects of life.

Numbers play a constant, significant role in our lives, but we  shouldn’t allow them to limit our dreams and ideas. We are equally important and we should not, cannot, allow our ideas and opinions to be governed by and reduced to a series of figures.