Checking One's Privilege

I'm checking my privilege. I do this periodically so I can remember where my viewpoints have formed. 

I was born in 1968, just before Czechoslovakia fell to the Russians and Ringo quit The Beatles for the first time. Bobby Kennedy has been buried two months before. Martin Luther King, two months before that. The Vietnam War was still happening. Australia had conscription. The average Australian house price in 1968 was $18,000. The Flower Children and the Hippies were beginning to bud. John Gorton was Prime Minister. They were still hoping Harold Holt was in a Chinese submarine. 

I was born to parents who were both war babies. Both hold the scars and quirks of having parents born pre-World War One. One of my grandfathers enlisted in 1918, willing to do his bit for King and Country. They didn't take him. Too skinny. And the war was nearly over. And his mother had already lost one son. My grandfather's brother was a decorated war hero. One of the most decorated non-combatants in WWI. Look him up. Eric Roy Jarvis. He's my Mum's uncle. 

I come from a family of Methodists. On one side, they are Methodist clergy. I went to Sunday School until I was about 16, when at that time, as it made no sense to me, and I had to drive myself, I gave it up, handing in my Christian ticket a few years later when I worked out what spirituality worked better for me. I think the only thing Sunday School gave me was the ability to argue about religion and a love of ritual. 

Are you following?

I can be classed as:

• CIS gendered
• Heterosexual
• Spiritual but not religious
• Generation X
• 6th Generation White Australian of English (Cornish), Welsh and Scottish heritage. 
• I am a feminist
• I like to think that I am kind
• I'm reasonably well read
• I love pop culture
• And I'm an armchair political commentator

 I am educated. My first degree was mostly paid for by the Australian Federal Government thanks to Gough Whitlam and the fact that Tertiary Education was basically free until 1988. My Master's degree I paid for myself, but as it directly related to my field of work was able to claim it as a tax deduction. 

Being basically healthy, I've not had to over-utilise Medicare, the Australian health service. I am eternally grateful that, as I'm grateful that I live in a country with Government-sponsored socialised medicine, where if you have a heart attack, you're not sent bankrupt. I don't mind that a couple of thousand dollars of my taxes goes to Medicare. If I don't use it, somebody else will. It's there in case I need it. It's a bit like the theory of donating blood, which is not paid for here in Australia. If I donate blood, other people use it. If, by some misfortune, I need blood, hopefully somebody will have donated some enabling the saving of my life. You give. You get. What you put in, you get back. As above, so below. 

Australia is also a country which has decent workforce laws, provides people, mostly, with a living wage. A waitress doesn't need to hustle for tips. People don't need to work three jobs to keep a roof over their heads or food in their bellies. (Though with the housing crisis, we shudder a bit)

I am secure in my reproductive rights. My body. My choice. Being one of the one in three women who have had an abortion in their lifetime, I know that this was one of the best decisions I have made. I have always had access to contraception, with no qualms from any medical practitioner. I know that if anybody in Australia presents with and ectopic pregnancy or other life threatening pregnancy complication, they will be treated with compassion and speed to have the situation rectified. Abortion is healthcare and is treated as such in Australia. There are limitations and guard rails around late term abortions, but these laws are enacted by medical practitioners. This makes sense to me. No conservative, pale, stale male dictates what I can and can't do with my reproductive organs. (We won't go into John Howard, Tony Abbott, Brian Harridine and the abortion pill debacle of the early 2000s.)

I live in a country with strict gun control legislation. I grew up around guns. There are reasons people need guns. But there is a difference between carting around a handgun, or owning semi-automatic weapons and having a single action shot gun, which was used for putting down ailing livestock and shooting cans off of fence posts. 

Australia is a secular country with the right to religious freedom entrenched in our constitution. I love that I get to celebrate not only Christian festivals, but Diwali, Eid, Hanukah and various Asian New Year festivities. When being sworn in as a politician, you can choose to affirm your allegiances. No Bible, Koran, Talmud, Baghavad Gita, Egyptian Book of the Dead required. It's your choice. 

I do not live in Utopia. There is plenty wrong about Australia. There's a hell of a lot that is not good at all. Dreadful politicians from across the board. Inaction over climate change. The cost of living. Aged care. Violence against women, Conservative politicians and their dog whistling.... the list can go on. 

But for all that is not great about, I still find myself checking my privilege and give thanks for all that I have. For the freedoms our laws provide.

And that I empathise with those who don't have what has been bestowed on me, whether by luck, hard work, generational fortitude or sheer chance. 

It's this empathy, the ability to feel for what others are going through, that makes me most grateful, and hopeful. 

Because, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, "The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism."

I wish America would check their privilege and start to empathise with many of their own citizens. Have a look at see that there are other ways of doing things. You don't have to go all kumbaya to do this. As Harper Lee's Atticus Finch once said, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."

I've tried to get into the skin of a Trump-voting American. 

I don't understand. I don't get it. I don't like it. 

But it's not my country, not my government, not my president, and I can't do anything about it, but hope that some empathy, and foresight, and common sense starts to prevail. 

And I'll continue to count my blessings. 

Today's song: