Privilege
I attempted to watch the Gong Show known as the Democrat Party Debates and it was all about free stuff and race, over and over and over. How a bunch of minorities can stand on a stage and vie for the most powerful job in the world and still claim to be held back is kind of a mystery to me but I’m a bit simple.
The whole thing boiled down to a thesis statement that white people, white guys in particular, get all the breaks. I’m here to cite a few personal examples of how that just isn’t true.
Back in the 90’s WOOD TV 8 had a thing called “The Goofy Games” where three of the TV 8 crew and one local would go down to Disney World and compete against other TV stations in the national Goofy Games. To fill that one spot they invited ten non-TV people to come to Grand Rapids for a tryout. I was chosen to represent the west coast, Muskegon/Grand Haven/Holland.
So I get to GR, see my competition, and quickly realize I am (in my mind at least) the odds-on betting favorite by a mile. I was in peak physical condition and the other contestants looked like overweight goats who chain smoked.
The idea was to complete an obstacle course the fastest. We had to make a putt shooting the golf ball with a cue stick, climb a rope ladder, fill a glass by squeezing oranges, and stuff like that, easy peazy, gas up the plane I’m going to Disney World.
As I expected, I went through that course like Grant through Richmond, I finished over a minute ahead of everyone else and waited at the finish line looking back like Mark Spitz.
When everyone had finished they announced they were selecting the person who came in second, a girl, because she had better TV presence. There’s no way she outshined my LED light, this girl was a toad, a personality-less toad at that.
And then it dawned on me, the three members of the TV 8 crew were two men and a woman, they had to pick a woman to fill out the team or it would have been uneven. I went to
GR and climbed a rope for nothing, I had no chance of being selected solely because of my gender.
Gyp.
Last summer I spent a couple weeks in Hermosa Beach, California. Our hotel was on the ocean (but all rocks) and was sort of directly between Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach. Hermosa, for lack of a better term, was more “white” and Redondo was more “Mexican.” So one day, Fathers Day as it turned out, I decided to walk over to Redondo instead of Hermosa. When I got there it was 100% Mexican families.
I didn’t care, a beach is a beach and the sun shines on everyone without judgement or disdain. I found a little open spot in the sea of people and threw down my towel. My son Q went to the water while I caught some rays. A few minutes after laying down I sat up to, ya know, make sure the kid wasn’t eaten by a shark, and I noticed that there was NO ONE within ten feet of me in an almost perfect circle. If you had looked down from a drone you would have thought I had a force field around me or I hadn’t bathed in a month. There was literally a circle of sand around my towel large enough to hold a bike race if the bikes were really small and ridden by macaque monkeys.
Now the only possible reason I can think of for all the Mexican families around me to pick up their blankets and move is/was because I’m a white guy. I don’t know what they thought I was going to do but whatever it was these people wanted a ten foot head start.
Ya know what? It didn’t bother me in the least, I was absolutely no questions asked singled out because of my race and somehow resisted weeping.
And that’s how the world goes, sometimes you get a break and sometimes you don’t. Life moves on and so should you. Life is never, ever fair, ever. That’s just how the world works, that’s human nature and if you get slighted on one end you’ll probably have a head start at the other. The United States is still the greatest country ever to exist, it’d just be nice if people learned to roll with the punches a little better – the US is great, but that doesn’t mean it’s a ... magic kingdom.
Printed by permission of the author. Email him at Lorenzatlarge@aol.com. Get Tracy’s latest book at BarnesandNoble.com or Amazon.com, or download it from www.fastpencil.com.
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