Your father moving before you were born isn’t an external agency? Did you guys discusss it at the time? Are you the one who talked him into doing it?
Oh! This thread has over 20 replies since I last looked at it. Let’s see what…
Oh.
Like I said, fathers choice. Not Lady Luck, God, Allah, a leprechaun, or any kind of intangible and ethereal external agency.
I think the part I’m struggling with is that you’re taking credit for your father’s decisions as if they were your own. If you’re not, then you have to acknowledge that something over which you had no control was a factor in your own success. And you haven’t answered my question about the other you, the one whose father never made out of that swamp. But never mind.
Maybe don’t come into the forum and attack everyone and talk down to them like you know them in your first week, dude.
Maybe learn to make a cogent argument, dude.
It’s easy enough to look at my profile and see that I’ve been in the forum for 5 years.
and the entire civilisation of sentient dinosaurs that didn’t achieve space travel and a galactic empire because of the comet that hit Yucatan? Why aren’t you bringing them up?
Because they didn’t put you on the outskirts of the City?
Can’t luck just be “hey, I rolled a critical hit in that combat” or at least “hey I didn’t roll a couple of critical misses”. It can’t be hard to imagine alternate PWKs who had the same attitude and would have made the same decisions but got very sick or had an accident at the wrong time developed a serious mental condition or something. Or PWKs who didn’t work any harder but had a couple of critical things work out and are ahead of where you are now.
For what it’s worth, in starting this discussion I never intended to say that it’s not possible to improve your circumstances (or that of your family, community, etc) with hard work. Clearly there are examples of folks that have done well despite less than ideal starting conditions. If you look in the aggregate, though, that’s the exception rather than the rule.
I think the more important takeaway here is that it takes more effort for those on the low end of the wealth/opportunity divide to get the same results. As we saw on Scandal, “You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have!” They were talking about race and gender there, but I think it applies to any kind of opportunity gap, including wealth.
Totally agree, and I don’t think you said or implied anything like that.
Lucky for you, though.
I started with a long post last night and decided to keep it brief instead today.
I am privileged in many ways today and not privileged in other ways. When I was a kid, it was the same but privileged and not privileged for different reasons.
And several sides of my family, their conditions in life just keeps getting worse, so at no point am I ever convinced I will stay where I am at. It’s still hard for me to spend more than twenty dollars on any piece of clothing, and even being able to do that as a kid was a privilege of sorts, but it’s not really a restriction now. I know what it’s like to go to school with duct tape on my glasses to hold them together.
I’ve gotten to where I am today based on hard work, luck and often having a chance to recover from a mistake. I think that’s where the inequality can still rear it’s ugly head despite hard work. The rich with the support structure of the rich can often afford to make mistakes and still move on. The others, one mistake can sink you, and we should all be afforded some mistakes in life. I met a woman who was old enough not to be allowed in a library, and of course her parents were not allowed that either. There is just really no way to go back in time and make things equal for everyone. so we’ve got try and give opportunities to lift people up.
While I am not really a conservative, I am still too conservative for the socialist / Bernie crowds.
Absolutely. And when you do that, when you give people the boost or tools or medical care they need to stabilize their lives so they can go out and get a job and support themselves, everybody wins.
People talk a lot about privilege and social mobility, but they paradoxically mostly want to care only about upwards social mobility, never downwards.
If you want a society where we really have equality of opportunity, then you also want a society with 100% inheritance tax and a ban on private education. (I’d be personally fine with that).
The big problem isnt just that some people end up wealthier than others, but that the situation gets a damage multiplier whenever a child is born, and they get handed a huge phat advantage.
If you really want to improve equality in society, make sure you kids get fuck-all when you die, and make sure they know that will happen from a very early age :D.
I don’t have kids.
I have kids, but I like the idea of 100% inheritance tax and 100% public education. Then the rich will need to hire even more accountants and lawyers to get around the laws and find loop holes, leading to more high paying jobs.
And that is how we grow the middle class!
At some point, privilege does get to be a fairly ridiculous concept, when extended too far. I mean yes, I am privileged some ancestor of mine didn’t take an arrow to the head in some battle somewhere. I suppose I am privileged to be white. But not as privileged as if I were a White Russian oligarch’s kid. Or frankly, an Indian tech billionaire’s kid.
Was I privileged to have abusive parents? Or to have gone to a hick school system that thought it’s job was teaching kids enough so they could farm like their daddies? Was I privileged to be born into a family with an extensive history of depression and anxiety so crippling that I can’t work right now? Was I privileged to mix water in with the ketchup to make it last longer?
Is my Indian friend privileged to have been born to two doctors, and had all of his education completely paid for, while I paid all of mine myself?
Some of this I get, I really do. But as someone who essentially grew up in a slightly better version of Hillbilly Elegy, I do sometimes question what we are really after with this stuff. I mean yes, someone in Somalia had fewer advantages than I did.
I guess I don’t get the point? I mean to some degree, we’re all privileged to be alive. Nearly every person has things that they can point to that is luck based (being part of the small percentage of the world that was born in a first world country, let alone the U.S.).
Likewise, I imagine nearly every person has things they can point to where they suffered disadvantages that others did not.
Isn’t that kind of life?
The point for me in recognizing privilege is when shaping policy. I had a friend who was born to a comfortable middle class home, his father was a very successful engineer and a VP of a successful company. His mother was well-educated as well. He certainly wasn’t born with a silver spoon or anything but he had a bunch of advantages a lot of people didn’t, like always having access to a well-paying job at the father’s company, the ability to live rent free during college, and very substantial financial assistance from the parents when purchasing a home.
Yet this friend was absolutely convinced he had no privilege, that he worked for everything he had. It was true in a sense - he had to go to college and get a degree, it’s not like he was a trust fund kid. But he didn’t see all the other things he had. And because of that, he despised poor people, because they were poor due to being lazy or poor life decisions. Your typical FYGM Republican, basically. But in any case, he has pushed and voted from the time we were first old enough to vote for the removal of any and all social services from Medicare to food stamps to programs like CHIP. If anyone is in that position, it’s because of their moral failings and their lack of desire to work hard. So fuck 'em, why should he be taxed to support those bums? He made it, so they can too, right? They just gotta want to put in the work.
So for people like that? I think it’s important to point out the privileges we do have. We all don’t start from the same place. There might be a genius kid growing up in a house where the parent is deciding whether they are buying food or keeping the lights on that month, where the kid goes to a dangerous school that lacks decent textbooks, a computer lab, things like that. That kid isn’t focused on a cure for cancer or a great new invention, he’s just trying to make it day to day. If that future doctor or scientist never gets to opportunity to meet his or her potential, it’s a loss for all of us.
Anyway, sorry for rambling. But that’s why I see the importance of acknowledging and pointing out privilege. I’m surrounded by people who refuse to see it and condemn others that lacked it for not being as successful as they.
Yeah, but maybe his dad worked long hours and didn’t gave your friend enough hugs, so it’s practically the same as not having enough to eat or doing without electricity in order to avoid eviction. /s
Isn’t the point that you don’t have to worry that some cop will shoot your teenage son just for existing? As I father, I think that’s huge.