The problem is, we are never going to have actual healthy communities where things like helping the homeless and the disabled are valued under a domination-based culture. Our current economic system is predicated on there being 30-40% of the population who remain as a poor underclass and as a society we don't really care about the fact that one in five children and one in five seniors and a huge percentage of veterans are food insecure and hungry. If we did, we'd do something about it. But that is an intrinsic aspect of the pyramid shape of the hierarchy.
In order to truly impact the things that you care about, we are going to need to radically transform the way that we relate to each other. There just isn't any other way to make a substantial and lasting impact.
"In a patriarchal dominance hierarchy, rankings and status are often artificial, based on immutable traits like gender, race, and sexuality, or in life situations that confer inherent disadvantages right from the start, such as being born into poverty. It’s also maintained through a kind of might makes right ethos that justifies and even approves of ruthlessness in order to rise in the pecking order.
In the face of that, racial, gender, sexual, or other kinds of equality can never be achieved, because that is so deeply incompatible with the framework that our society is built on — one of violent domination of others in order to achieve power and position. This is something that our nation knows well, and believes in at its core. Manifest Destiny, the 19th-century cultural belief that America had not only a right but a duty to settle, annex, and claim all the land in the West (no matter who else was already on it) was a reflection of this sort of mindset. Might Makes Right and the fittest, i.e., the most ruthless survive. (Interestingly, actual evolutionary fitness refers to who is the most adaptable in any given environment, not who is the tallest, strongest, or most cold-blooded.)"
