@Shiggy said in RL Anger:
I'd really like to have a conversation about how to make Trumpcare better than Obamacare, but instead all we can have are rabid defense of Trumpcare or rabid defense of Obamacare, both of which are deeply flawed in different ways.
This is a common sense, realistic, sane human being approach to the current problem, even if we may not ultimately agree about what 'better' would look like.
Have some coffee, spike it if you gotta, because yes, pretty much this, this is the point I see from where I'm sitting.
I do not agree with you about the idea that people think white, straight men are the devil. Some, yes. Some people think any grouping of individuals is precisely that.
Any realistic discussion of privilege? Recognizes that it exists on a spectrum, and any given individual is going to fall at different points in different ways. You will never have to live in fear that if you become pregnant, you will be relegated to spend the remainder of your life in a wheelchair at best; that is a privilege, and it's real. I will also never have to face the potential of a former sex partner come to me out of nowhere and, a decade after I have heard from them, say: I have had your baby, and you need to give me money going forward for the support of that child. That is a challenge you could face and I cannot; that is a privilege I have that you do not.
Both of these things require an attempt at understanding and human empathy is required to even begin to achieve that understanding, because these things are outside the realm of our possible and personal experience. When we make decisions about them, we cannot only think of ourselves and what we want.
You and I will not face the problems someone who is not white will face in America. That's just a fact. It does not mean that as white people, we cannot have problems, we cannot face suffering, we cannot be subject to unfairness or harsh circumstance. It means that there is a subset of experiences we have the privilege of not being subject to in this country that have a real impact on people's lives.
This is not a difficult principle to understand on the most basic level. Most people of my generation and those after -- I'm 43, for whatever that matters -- understand this as a general principle.
Most of us have internalized the idea that the color of someone's skin or their gender should not matter in regard to how we treat that person as a fellow human being, for instance, but our lack of being someone different than ourselves is still something we cannot understand in the same way, and the lesson of listening to those experiences in order to enable us to come to that understanding is a more difficult lesson to internalize. As a result, we treat others 'just like us', and think this is enough to balance the scales; in an ideal world, this would be the case, but it is not functionally so in a reality that is still riddled with flaws, because our experiences are different, and we are still in some ways blind to the ways in which this is so.
Broadly speaking, intentions are good. Very few people actually embrace hate and shrill horribleness and othering with the intent to do so.
It still doesn't change the basic fact that you and I might face certain class or income-based suffering that someone of another race in another social class or with considerably higher income does not. That's something that happens, it's something that's real, and it's something we collectively ignore at our own peril. It also doesn't change the fact that that same person of another race may face suffering that we do not, even if it isn't the same suffering, which we also ignore at our own collective peril.
(Hilariously, the week on that I had huge amounts of bacon daily I lost 12 pounds and it stayed off for six months... somebody has to explain that shit to me because seriously that's freaky.)
