I have so many feels about liberals lately!
On the one hand, if by liberal, you mean, "This girl doesn't care about your penis," then we're all on the same damn side. The having or not-having of a penis never figured into my selection of sexual partners (my "ex-gay" status is more a happy coincidence for my parents than a reflection of a preference on my part -- there are several billion men in the world, but only one whose face I am able see on the daily without demanding, mid sentence, that said face be SHUT RIGHT NOW), so why would I consider it a worthwhile investment of my finite time on Earth to patrol the anatomy of your life partner/priest/president?
Moreover, when I'm not checking myself in an effort to be diplomatic, I think we all could handle a big fat dose of WWJD when it comes to water for others versus craft beers for me (me, above all), and I think our prison, military, health care, and education systems probably are basically money making schemes that line the pockets of a veritable army of sycophants and cronies at the expense of the young, poor, sick, or ill-fortuned.
And yet.
I also think that it is a ridiculous cop-out to act like fighting with other privileged people about their political believes constitutes a response to the troubling apparatus of racial and economic privilege. Or, to be more blatantly antagonistic: there's no opinion you can have that makes you less white or less middle class -- and this includes conflating those two types of privilege, or collapsing the latter into some sort of subsidiary of the first.
There are white people whose privilege includes the assumption that they can count on having clean clothes, consistent access to food and housing, a college education; that if they work hard, they will succeed and can have a mortgage and go to the doctor when they are sick and retire before they turn eighty. And there are people who, white privilege notwithstanding, don't make those assumptions.
I'd submit that those people experience white privilege in fundamentally different ways, and that the latter group might be reasonably offended by assumption that they belong to the former. There's working hard at your internship, and there's working hard picking strawberries in the 110 degree heat, or turning an positioning the elderly and incontinent for thirty years, or cleaning the toilets of others (Did you think rich people gave more thought to aiming than your average Bonnaroo attendee? Friend, you were mistaken!) I think you can respect the hard work involved in each of these endeavors while acknowledging that they aren't the same experience. And, more to the point, having the choice between shit-cleaning and coffee-fetching is a fundamentally different experience than not having that choice.
And what I'm saying is that often, though not always, the white people who fail to "get" the enlightened economic views espoused by, like, John Stewart or Barak Obama, are speaking, not out of racism or ignorance, but out of the frustration you might feel if you spent fifty hours a week doing manual labor, with things like college and fair-trade coffee outside your realm of experience, and then were told to check your privilege by someone half your age who gets paid to blog, or to provide administrative support for the blogging efforts of others, or, yes, to teach kids or wrench tenure from the fists of a parasitic academic establishment.
I am solidly upper middle class, and have been, certainly, for my adult life. I am privileged to the point that I turned down the opportunity to pursue an academic career because I felt like it wasn't "useful". That is privilege. Having a choice about the kind of work you do is a function of privilege; for the majority of the world, including some Americans, the choice is work or starve.
I saw that experience: I ate the beans and Raman noodles and donated cheese; I learned to ignore the pointed comments about how much I must like that shirt, since I wear it, like, every Monday. None of this negates either the current economic privilege I experience or the privilege my skin afforded me even when my family was broke and scared. But it does mean that your white privilege, Huffpo blogger, may not be the same as mine.
And it does mean that the anti-gun-control, anti-government-spending, Fox-News watching segment of the population aren't chumps, at least, not to me. They are people whose experience is informed by a different set of frustrations than my own, and they are people who, from what I've seen of that experience, have legitimate reasons to prefer less government control. You might be more adamant about the second amendment, too, if you believed that the government was as likely to arrest and jail you unfairly as it is to assist you. You might want to keep your money if you'd applied for assistance yourself and been told no, or if you'd been raised not to accept help, only to wait in line with a basket full of Krasdale products while the mom in front of you rang up Breyers and Diet Coke with EBT. It's one thing to begrudge other people those things when you can have them. It's another thing to hear "We can't afford that" on trip after trip, to say that to your kids, and to see someone else buy those things with tax-funded entitlements when you can't afford them with your post-tax paycheck.
I also think it's one thing to feel angry and outraged about someone else's kids getting shot in their home or their school, and another to feel like you, personally, are not safe in your home, in your community, in your school, and then to hear that your gun -- which you see as a way of protecting yourself, something you do not trust the government or the police force to do -- is the problem.
My family kept guns because we, for a time, we lived in places where you'd get robbed and nothing would happen, where the cops mostly arrested you and beat you up rather than helping you. I think a person who doesn't trust the government might reasonably ask why the response to people breaking the law with guns should be to limit gun access to people who are willing to disregard gun control laws.
I'm not saying that person is "correct" or that the problem is that simple. But I'm saying that that person is not stupid, or blind, or indifferent to losses they see on TV. Often, I think they react that way because they see violence as an immediate threat to them, rather than a tragedy or a talking point.
I have a son, so each day, I send him into a dangerous world and assume the risk of my life simply ending according to the whim of someone else's kid. I would love to believe that a political movement, lobbying, or legislation could insulate me, because there are days where I feel like the possibility of my life being over in that particular way is lodged in my chest and I can't swallow or breath around it.
But I don't think you argue the world into a better place, and I don't think political or rhetorical solutions work for what is, at its heart, an existential problem. We cannot protect the people who comprise our lives. We never could. Changing gun laws won't change that. That problem is between you and the universe as you understand it.
But we can: feed people who are hungry. Acknowledge the crazy and dirty and intrusive people on our commutes. Help people with their homework, with their resumes. Listen to their baggage and bullshit and fight to see their humanity rather than just deconstructing their talking points. And while people can do what they want, I think people who want a less violent and incoherent world might do well to start there, rather than on Twitter.
I don't know why carrying bags of potatoes around or teaching a former inmate Microsoft Word or switching a patient from nasal cannula to venti mask for the seventh time in an hour makes it possible to continue living when a lost person could walk into a preschool or a classroom or a recording studio or a subway station and rip apart my life. But it does, whereas even the most measured political debates just feel like avoidance to me.
Similarly, I don't know what it means to check my privilege. But I do understand Luke 12:48, and I do feel like Christ was pretty clear that really what matters is how you respond when someone needs something. Not so many directives about holding the correct political views, or demanding that someone else hand over their money to even things out. Mostly: feed them, visit them, love them. Unreservedly, unconditionally, and with no illusion that those actions will protect you from pain or loss.
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