SLEEPWALK | SANTO & JOHNNY
There is something slick about the word equality. It slips out smoothly and makes promises the world has never learned to keep. A clean word for a messy world. I hear it everywhere now. On the news. In speeches. Painted on protest signs. And every time it shows up, I feel that familiar tug in my chest, warning me that reality is limping somewhere behind the slogan.
I sit at the espresso bar just before closing. The Brewtonia sunset stains the sky with bruised violet, burnt orange, and a thin seam of gold. The clouds look like they are daring someone to try. In this light, I find myself thinking less about coffee ratios or tomorrow’s pastry list and more about that eight-letter word people keep treating like a cure for everything.
Equality.
It sounds noble, doesn’t it? Balanced. But if you have lived long enough, and I certainly have, you begin to notice it behaves more like a mirage than a map.
“We are not eggs sorted into cartons,” I say quietly, mostly to the room itself. Jasmine looks up from the syrup station where she has been lining bottles with that precise care of hers. I nod toward the window. “A carton promises uniformity. A community never will.”
The café is settling into that end-of-day hush. The last spoons clink. Chairs shift softly. I lean back and wrap my hands around a mug that still holds a little warmth. I let the thought finish brewing.
The version of equality sold from podiums often confuses fairness with identical treatment. It offers a tidy symmetry that looks respectable from a distance and falls apart the moment an actual sentient life enters the room.
Human beings arrive with different bodies, histories, gifts, and obstacles. One child arrives with a sharp mind and a family equipped to nurture it. Another arrives just as capable but must spend that gift learning how to survive without guidance. Are we really meant to call those lives equal? The word starts to feel naive if you sit with it long enough. Maybe even cruel. Equality belongs in our laws, but by itself it is too blunt an instrument to meet the needs of every life.
I remember a politician on television once. Polished. Confident. His tie sat straight. His ethics did not. He smiled and said we were making great strides toward equality. I nearly choked on my biscotti. What he meant was that things looked balanced enough to pass a surface inspection.
“Give them the illusion of fairness,” I mutter, “and they will stop reaching for the facts.”
It’s an old trick, dear Sippers. Equality becomes the shiny coin tossed our way while the real wealth stays tucked behind velvet ropes. You see it in schools where zip codes decide futures. You see it in clinics where care shifts with income and skin tone. I see it when a student takes the corner table until closing because the school library locks its doors before her mother finishes work. Even justice, the blindfolded symbol we are taught to trust, has a habit of peeking.
I close my eyes and breathe in the lingering scent of cinnamon and cardamom drifting through the café. Cinnamon smells like cinnamon. Cardamom has nothing to sell me.
When I open my eyes, Jasmine is watching me again. There is curiosity there, polite and unforced. I tilt my head slightly.
So no, I don’t want equality. You can’t tend them all the same and expect them to thrive. What I wanted was harder to package. A shared belonging that treated difference as essential instead of inconvenient.
I wrote one word at the bottom of the page.
Universality.
A fresh cup steams beside my notebook, and a second one cools beside it. I always brew two when an idea feels too heavy to carry alone.
The first part of this entry pulled the thread loose. Equality, as we like to package it, doesn’t hold up under close inspection. It is polished and palatable but totally hollow in the middle. A slogan that fits neatly on signs but not on lives.
Now, I’m in my office & I want to write about something else. Something more complicated. Universality. I don’t hear that word as often. It doesn’t A/B test well with consultants and marketing teams. I have never heard a politician run on a universality platform. But it’s the only framework that has ever made any real sense to me.
I put pen to paper and let it find its way.
Universality isn’t merely a utopian dream. It’s a pattern repeated throughout nature. It’s the thread that runs through every living thing whether we notice it or not. Equality, when reduced to identical treatment, tries to squash us into uniformity. Universality leaves us distinct but still woven together.
I imagine myself speaking to someone sitting across from me. Maybe one of you. Maybe just another person tired of hearing the same promises in different packaging.
“Look around,” I tell them. “At the trees, the rivers, the mountains. Each takes shape under different conditions, yet each belongs to a larger system. That’s universality. It doesn’t ask us to become the same. It asks us to recognize that no life exists alone.”
In people terms, that means honoring someone’s needs instead of pretending we all have the same ones. It’s not enough to hand everyone the same tools. We must ask whether those tools can be used under the conditions in which each person lives.
That shift matters. Because where equality can be used to erase nuance, universality depends on it. It builds policy and culture with difference in mind, not as a flaw but as a feature.
Take education. A shallow version of equality gives every school the same package and calls the job finished. Universality asks a better question. What does this community need, and how can this school serve its people? One school may need agricultural science, broadband access, and local apprenticeships. Another may need multilingual support, arts programs, and safe transportation after dark. Both are valuable. Neither needs to be forced into the other’s mold.
The same goes for healthcare. Equal access to a clinic is only the beginning. “Universality asks whether the clinic understands the people expected to trust it. Who lives here? What do they face? What do they carry? What do they fear? It’s not about standardizing every exam room. It’s about ensuring care meets the patient where they are.
I pause, eyes drifting to the photo tacked above my desk. It’s from our first summer after opening. Jasmine and Mack are behind the bar. Henry’s at the pastry case pretending not to smile. I remember that day. Remember how hard it was to believe we could pull this whole thing off. We didn’t have a perfect system. We still don’t. But this café has always run on the spirit of universality.
We greet everyone with the same dignity. What comes after depends on what they need. Some folks need quiet. Some need company. Some need coffee with a splash of hemp milk, and others just need to be asked how their day is going.
Universality lives in that kind of attention.
I think about the winter the power failed and every working stove on our block became a neighborhood resource. No one insisted on identical portions. We counted children, medications, blankets, and hours until morning. That, to me, is universality in action.
Language shapes what we believe is possible. Equality is a marketing word, often reduced to something easy to advertise. Universality is rougher around the edges. It asks more of us because it refuses to separate dignity from attention.
I think about working-class families. About the empty promises made to them for decades. That trickle- down “fairness” dangled like a carrot. The results that never quite come. Equality sounds like justice but NEVER finishes the job. Universality doesn’t pretend to fix everything. It just speaks with veracity. And it asks us to do better because we belong to each other.
“Think of a choir,” I write. “Each voice different. Each one necessary. Harmony is not born from sameness. It is born from cooperation.”
I look around my office. The light is low and the street is quiet. The only sounds are the refrigerator’s low hum and the quiet insistence of honeysuckles along the back windows. This isn’t a sermon, nor is it an answer. But maybe, just maybe, it is a step toward something better.
I close my notebook and whisper to the room.