Comments on: What is privilege?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:33:20 +0000

sounds like the viewpoint of someone who is privileged.

By: disabled

disabled — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:20:05 +0000

Privilege is being able to focus on the positive in life instead of the negative.

By: Dave Pollard

Dave Pollard — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 15:33:21 +0000

Interesting. The root meaning of the word is ‘a special law for one person’. By that meaning, when Bush signed the executive orders indicating that he would not be bound by 750 US laws if he in his personal judgement decided they impeded the WoT, he was invoking executive privilege in the true sense of the word. Many have wealth, though many more have not. A few have power. But in this terrible world, only one person deems himself, without anyone challenging his assertion, to be privileged.

By: Barbara

Barbara — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 20:22:30 +0000

I agree, Eric. There’s a difference between someone who’s privileged but suffering and outright stupid selfishness or greed. It’s all about what we do with what we’re given.

Last night I saw an interview Bill Moyers did with Mary Gordon, as part of his PBS series on Faith and Reason. She mentioned that two things today that threaten what she most treasures are 1) fundamentalism and 2) the overemphasis on money, along with the outright greed and consumerism it feeds into.

The part of the interview I refer to is viewable as a preview here:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/watch2.html

I think greed is probably the greatest problem with mankind today. That and overpopulation. If those two problems could be overcome, we’d likely have a much more liveable world. I’m with her on fundamentalism, too, as one of my top three.

By: Eric Mayer

Eric Mayer — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 20:06:24 +0000

Given our lack of health care, employment rights and so forth compared to much of the developed world, we Americans are really not as privileged as many of us tend to think.

You are right — it is a conundrum that a person who is privileged can still feel as much or more pain than one who isn’t privileged. I’ve never figured out if there’s some sort of moral calculation one could do to compare different cases.

I do draw a line, however, at wealthy people being pained by their perceived lack of money. That I find unjustifiable. I can’t feel sorry, for instance, for some people I know who are in constant misery because of spending more than their very large incomes — incomes that would easily support a more modest life style even given the cost of everything today.