Privilege

Good morning.   Two weeks ago browsing the library shelves for memoirs I had on my growing list,  I came across Melinda Gates’ The Next Day.  Huh, I thought.  Not usually the kind I’d choose…still, a memoir.

Gates’ book is a slim volume about transitions in life…hers particularly, but often related to others’ as well.  I’d also chosen two books of short stories, my favorite bedtime reading, but night after night, I put those back in the library bag, unhappy with their murky pretensions.  On the third night I picked up Gates.

For a small book, it isn’t a fast read.  Each chapter having its own life lesson for her, it was easy to pick up, put down, pick up later, etc.  I’m a famously fast reader, but this one seemed to defy quickness.  It unfolded the way a journal would, the writer laying down facts and feelings about her life, as if she knew someone would read it eventually. So that’s how I read through it.

It was interesting enough even to mark some points I wanted to pass on to you or to my reading group, and when I finished it the bookmarks remained.  Not new thoughts about life…about trying too hard to organize your life, about accepting that life has its own agenda for you, about grief and caring, about how strength finds you when you need it…but something remindable, relatable.

Which brings me, after all this overly-long preface, back to the title of this post.  From the beginning, Melinda Gates lays down the obvious but necessary base to the way she has gone through the many transitions in her life until she has reached 60.

“I recognize….I’ve benefited from a tremendous amount of privilege, and there’s no question that has insulated me from some of life’s hardships in ways that have limited my perspective.”  No, I don’t think she’s soft-pedaling an excuse.  I’m having a hard time calling up what I mean by that…sorry.  After all, the point of her considerable philanthropy is deliberately directed to women who do not have privilege. 

The next morning, I woke up thinking about what it takes to call oneself privileged.

What is it we consider privilege? The Oxford says it is “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.”  You can be born into it, inherit it, earn it, fall into it.  It isn’t only about wealth, but chance and something else I am having trouble naming…something to do with one’s integral being, I think.  I don’t know that we always use the word correctly…am I “privileged to know you?”  Is it a “privilege to accept this award?”

And is “immunity” a really good point here?

 Without anything like Gates’ resources, her connections, her public and private successes, I nonetheless feel privileged. There have been rough places along the way, yes, searing, heartbreaking, betrayals and missed-steps…stumbling through times I have been horribly blind, self-serving, my own worst fall-woman.  But still coming through thanks to privilege…people to fall back on, eventually, jobs to arise when needed, kindness seen and unseen, pure chance. Even in my poorest days, I had a roof over me, and something to eat.  That and my health have grounded me in privilege.

And no, I’m not bragging (or whatever I am failing to call it), either. I think privilege is something many of us ignore about our circumstances.  Those who know, whatever their circumstances, that life has afforded them sustenance, know privilege.

I’ll stop here now, still thinking this through.  But it occurred to me to send a version of my first draft to my PORCH neighborhoods in my monthly call for food donations, and it sparked quite a lot of generosity…clearly they, too, understood what privilege meant and are trying to share it.

Perhaps you will respond with your own thoughts or comments on mine…I’d welcome them. 

Meanwhile, the weather suddenly turning to early summer and the ground blossoming with spring, I’m off to find something to do in the yard.   Another kind of privilege?