Privilege, and responsibility

I was writing an e-mail to a friend, and decided to make it a blog post instead. She mentioned how much she appreciates that I've dedicated myself to following my passions, and found a way to make it work. I was struck, as I often am, by how extraordinarily, amazingly privileged and lucky I am to be able to live my life the way I do.

Sure: J and I live relatively simply and inexpensively (outside of travel) and very consciously live within the bounds of one income. Even though we both love food, we don't eat out all that often. Well, J eats out a lot while traveling for work, and loves it, since she can justify it money-wise: she gets a per diem. Even when I'm traveling, I tend to shop at the market whenever possible, and try to get hotel rooms with fridges and microwaves, and even better, with kitchens.

We're amazingly lucky that most of my income, be it from lawyering, bartending, selling homebrew supplies, etc., can go to savings, travel, retirement, and fun stuff like bikes. On which note, our transportation choices also save us a lot of money: our car regularly sits in our parking space for weeks at a time. It's a 2007, and has ~16k miles on it. I clip coupons, comparison shop, and buy in bulk, and we cook almost all of our meals at home (as you've seen from this blog!) I stand in the store and do the math to figure out what the best price is for recycled toilet paper (and then pay more, if necessary, for the TP with the most post-consumer recycled content.) I do the same thing for soap and shampoo, and then pay more to get products that aren't tested on animals. I bring home napkins from airplanes and restaurants, though this is definitely as much an environmental decision as a money saving decision. Same for obsessively printing on recycled, re-sourced, and salvaged paper, and printing double sided whenever I run out of recycled/re-sourced/salvaged. While yes, our condo is in a high rise, with floor to ceiling windows, it's a 865 square foot, one bedroom, one bath. We don't need more, and so we don't get more. We still entertain. People we love still come to visit. (I even occasionally clean it when people visit! Come visit! We're fun! And sometimes not this preachy!)

I'm extraordinarily privileged that I can do so much volunteer and pro bono work, and very mindful of my obligation to give back to my communities, social justice causes, and people and the earth generally. I'm aware that every single thing I do matters. It's a little like the Butterfly effect: every thing I do, choose to not do, or fail to do, effects something. Not necessarily in a Newtonian way, in that it won't always be equal and opposite, but it does matter if I choose to decline a bag at the store, or put my litter in my pocket rather than drop it on the street, or ride my bike instead of driving my car, or stop to help someone on the street. It matters when I dumpster dive into the trash cans outside of Whole Paycheck for recyclables, or pull the junk mail out of the trash can in the mail room in our building and recycle it. (Though of course, for myself, I prefer to reduce, then reuse, then recycle.)

As I explained to a friend recently (hi A2! and p.s., it'd be easier to blog if I didn't have so many people whose names start with A and J: would you all consider changing your names? Or maybe going by your middle names?) I don't believe in the cockroach karma: i.e., if I stomp on a cockroach, I don't think I'll be reincarnated as a cockroach. (Though I don't kill cockroaches, or ants, or mosquitos: I don't need to, and they're just filling their econiche. And in the case of cockroaches, doing it incredibly well.) But I do believe in a more general kind of karma: I believe that if I generally do good in the world, good things will generally happen for me, and vise versa: if I generally do bad in the world, bad things will generally happen for me.

A good friend in law school (A3, are you still reading my blog? Want to consider changing your name?) was the first person I heard this quote from: "Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth." (attributed to both Shirley Chisholm and Marian Wright Edelman. I absolutely believe this to be true, and have tried hard to live most of my adult life this way.

I absolutley believe that I have an obligation to give back, and a responsibility to mitigate the immense privilege I have, much of which I was born with: skin privilege, gender privilege, language privilege, health privilege, being born into a developed nation privilege. Some of it I've acquired along the way: I'm graduated educated, have no more student loans, own a home, have extraordinarily good health care. If we want, and continue to live simply and mindfully, J and I can retire in our early 50s. Imagine that! We have a society where people work two and three jobs, where people work full time into their 70s even when they'd prefer not to, and we could quit working in less than twenty years.

When I talk about mitigating privelege, what I mean is that I must be mindful every day of my privilege, and to consciously and carefully work every day to be sure I'm not using it (them) unfairly, exploitatively, or abusively. To be privileged, and not give back, would be some or all of those three.

Okay, at a certain length, this probably gets preachy, and I don't want to lose what precious little readership I have. So I'm going to go do some volunteer work. Yes: really. And then tonight, go meet with a group I did (volunteer) legal observing with for a post-event wrap-up, and then have drinks with a friend who I'm working with on a recycling and non-profit fundraising project.