The MILLION-YEARS MASQUERADE II:
Mister Lonelyhearts Talks About Privilege
The other day, I told a friend about a revelation I’d had: a lot of stress and drama in both our lives had been caused by people who were unhappy about our friendship, jealous of our closeness. They felt excluded from our love because they didn’t understand it; so they became the very threat they assumed our togetherness was; and then they either learned to accept us together or they drifted away from us, into their own self-imposed and bitter isolation. For my friend and me, this process occurred many times with several different people, because we made each other happier and more thoughtful than we’d ever been before we met; and a lot of people are afraid of change. My friend agreed with this observation, and I joked that it was like we were a same-sex or interracial couple, before quickly adding: “It’s funny that it’s so controversial to be intimate with people who are similar to you in certain ways and DIS-similar to you in others. It’s also funny how we sometimes say things are ‘funny’ when we really mean they’re ‘unbelievably depressing or outrageous.’” This led to more agreement, and a discussion about privilege.
We decided that privilege is
a way of speaking
with confidence,
like having an all-knowing,
all-powerful imaginary friend
who always says you’re right;
and it’s also your privilege
to believe this friend’s faith
because you’ve never been told
that he hates you,
or that he talks bad about you
behind your back to others;
even if you HAD been told this,
you’d never have believed it
if you enjoy the privilege
of a family or church
to rally behind you, screaming
that your opponent will burn
for all eternity;
ah, yes! What a privilege
that is for you,
to have so many people
who will stop at nothing
to make you feel correct,
even if it means
shedding the blood
of their Salvation.
Privilege is also a way
of carrying your body
with confidence,
as if you weren’t born
with a heavy empty space
inside you, which many men,
including your father, want to own,
to plow or fertilize.
Privilege is also not being
hated for keeping your name,
or for having dreams
outside of parasites,
of feeding and cleaning other people;
ah, yes! What a privilege it is,
not being called a bitch, or
much worse, for being
selective or purposeful or
independently minded;
and what a privilege it is
to be successful or well-liked
without being expected to hide
your face and your body
with layers of this or that,
the whole time knowing
it will never be enough
for some people
and too much
for others;
the whole time knowing
there will always be millions
of people who think you’re
worthless or incomplete
unless you’re being filled with
the essence of someone else,
yielding to the ego and wants
of someone else.
Privilege is a way of living your life
with confidence, as if
you don’t often think of the
ever-present threat of violence
and humiliation, lurking in
the hands of every employee,
every representative, every boss:
the power to invalidate your life.
Privilege is an invincibility to,
a complete immunization
against these judgments,
and it’s also the confidence that goes along
with that, like never even needing to
imagine it, the being turned away
in public, by someone who has served
everyone else, and with a smile on top;
but you; you; your kind is not welcome here;
that’s what you’re told, much less politely and
more loudly than you can even imagine;
they silently scream, while visually strangling you,
that you are less than human; and your family,
your family is not real, even as they surround you,
congregating to honor the birth of someone
you all love, asking a baker to bake a cake;
the audacity of your subhuman request means
that you should be humiliated, they sneer behind
forced, barely wholesome grins; humiliated, for all
the children here to see, even your own children,
as they all learn and slowly decide how they’ll end up
treating people; how they’ll end up treating themselves.
No, that type of psychotic, harassing, rejection–that type
of intense demonization–will never happen to you,
the person whose great-grandfather was not born a slave;
whose grandfather was not randomly hanged from a tree limb
with a crowd of rabid white people celebrating around it;
you, whose parent or child was not killed in civil-rights
demonstrations, in systematic neglect or abuse, in a routine
police-stop; no; your parent or child, friend or lover, did not die
while simply walking somewhere; they were not beaten, shot, stabbed,
and murdered for being born a certain way,
or murdered for being a little too in-love.
No. These things aren’t true of you. You’re privileged.
You will never know the absolute obliteration of being told to “go back
where you came from” while walking with your family,
in the neighborhood you’ve always called home.
And people will always recognize the sanctity of YOUR family;
they will not be taken away at any moment, just because of some lines
drawn on a cartoonish diagram of the world
or the shape your genitals make.
Privilege is millions of things at once, we decided; both vast and tiny; but it’s always a sort-of filter; or it leads to a lensing, through which our views of reality can be distorted. Privilege makes us forget about circumstance, forget about the fact that anyone’s home can burn down; that your parents, children, or lovers could die before you’re even done reading this sentence; privilege makes you forget that anyone can lose what feels like everything to them; and many people in this world are privileged, but so many more still are starving and enslaved. And, so many more suffer quiet hungers and battles, oftentimes within themselves; so quietly, in fact, that nobody suspects they’re struggling before it’s too late. Privilege can do that, too. It can make you think that your vices or cruelty aren’t the same as other people’s; it makes you think that you’ll “never be as bad as that guy,” then you feel superior no matter what you do. Because you could never be as bad as drug addicts, even if you keep sexually harassing people; or, you could never be as bad as prostitutes, even though you might’ve thought about using one or being one a few times, but only as a masturbation fantasy. Yes; unchecked and/or unacknowledged privilege drives the wearer mad, spoils the empathy and higher-reasoning of our shared humanity; such rampant privilege takes you nowhere real, just further and further into the rabid contradictory delusion: thinking that you CAN be ANYTHING, and yet, at the same time, assuring yourself and others that there are certain things you’ll NEVER be. Privilege is a multifaceted anti-hero. Not a villain, not at all. Just a little corrupted from time to time. But of all the things privilege is, the most important by far is this: privilege is an advantageous, at least slightly above-average position to start a meaningful, powerful dialogue with those in your family and community. In fact: it is your holy, simple responsibility to use your privilege, but mostly to empower those who do not have it, and also to spread the sacred gospel, the truth that any advantage built from the fear, torment, and condemnation of others is an illusion not worth having.
Part 3 (“Realities for Men”) will be posted Monday, November 20.
Love always,
your Mister
Lonely Hearts Chapel 
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