I Am Privileged Because I Am Better Than You

I might be short and puny.

I might be cynical.

I might be perverted.

I might be a MEGALOMANIAC.

But I do have one thing going for me: I’m wealthy. Really, really wealthy.

Like Mitt Romney wealthy.

Like Puff Daddy wealthy.

Like I might blow 50k on a vacation, just cause I’m that wealthy wealthy.

LIKE I USE LOUIS VUITTON TRASH BAGS WEALTHY.

And I’m confused: Why is there this huge assault from the press and my private friends on the 1%? On us wealthy folk up here at Wayne Enterprises? Everyone says: YOU did not EARN YOUR MONEY. YOUR PARENTS DID.

And my question: SO WHAT? In his 1976 essay, Thomas Wolfe, writes:

Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, “I have only one life to live.” Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things.

My great grandfather was a 5’2″ immigrant. Shortly after moving to the United States, he was arrested and spent over ten years in prison. He was later pardoned. He was framed. He didn’t care about being in jail, but when he got out he focused on being a good dad and finding ways to make enough money to send my grandfather to college. That didn’t happen, though.

My grandfather went to war instead. When my grandfather got back, he worked his way up the corporate ladder, and at around the age of forty quit his job and started his own company. It was a gutsy move. The company was moderately successful. My grandfather died and my father took over the family business.

My father turned it into a very, very successful company. But that’s actually not the narrative we buy into in my family. Success, we believe, is the result of a succession of generations. There is no ego, no sense of self: Just picking up the work of the last generation and passing it onto another.

The mad German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, writes on heredity and history:

But if one considers his family history, one discovers the history of a tremendous storing up and capital accumulation of strength through all kinds of renunciation, struggle, work, and prevailing. It is because the great man has cost so much, and not because he appears as a miracle and gift of heaven and “chance,” that he has become great: “heredity” a false concept. One’s forebears have paid the price for what one is.

I am a privileged white male. This is the story of my privilege. And this will be the story of a new wave of immigrants into the United States: a new class of privilege. Can’t wait to start demonizing Mexicans for their privilege, FOUR OR FIVE GENERATIONS FROM NOW.

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