What to do with privilege?

To start a day without knowing what it will have in store, is a wonderful feeling.  I am immediately excited and intrigued to be breaking the heavy scheduled life i have found myself living.  There are endless possibilities where the day may go, and it may go no where which is fine as well! at least now it is.

I used to have a really hard time doing nothing.  (I should put a note this is completely not true when i am hungover, then nothing, is actually all i can achieve sometimes.)  But i always was filled with this need to keep myself occupied, I am not sure why, perhaps it is due to working crazy hours and trying to still go out and party on top of that, but to just sit and do nothing was really something only reserved for traveling.  Where doing nothing in a completely new surrounding is more then okay.

But that is not the point i wanted to try to explore in this.  What i was trying to get at, which perhaps what i wrote above illustrates quite well, is that I am so fucking privileged to wake up and have nothing to do, or on the flip side fill my day with things of my choosing.  I have always stood besides the idea that freedom was always is always about choice, if you have some options, then you have some freedom.  Discussing freedom in this piece seems ridiculous, so i will stick to privilege.  I see my privilege everyday, the fact that what i am doing, whatever it may be is a direct result of the family i was born into.  The sacrifices my parents made to give me and my siblings all we needed, were only afforded due to their privilege, and so on and so on!

So what now?   Now I or we find ourselves in a position of privilege, what are we to do?  This i do not have an answer to.  I stand by what i always end up concluding, that it is our duty to give some of our privilege back, to give others with less privilege more options and support.  Why should using my privilege only be about benefiting myself?  But its a tough argument, in our capitalistic society, our privilege is mainstreamed and measured monetarily.  So it then makes our privilege not about who we are as people, but how much money we have, or things we have bought with our money.  So because of this people see that the way to give their privilege is to give their money,  which I will have to say is not the worst thing.  While i will not make an argument for throwing money blindly at societies problems, I think sharing wealth is a important first step to sharing our privilege.  However to me the bigger thing that we in Canada are dragging our feet on for sure is giving our time, our energy, our intelligence. Opening our privilege to those who do not have as much or any of it.  It will not change the face of poverty, or mean that we will be solving all of our problems.  But it will build relationships, build a better understanding of other peoples living situations.  Without relationships its all of nothing!  I know I should be one biting my lip on this, I have fucked up way too many great relationships in my life.  But that will not mean that i will stop trying.  We need to identify our privilege and use it to build relationships with others who have less privilege.  Sometimes barriers can be removed in people's lives just by giving them someone to talk to weekly or daily, someone to share their struggle or issue with.  This is how small giving our privilege can be in order to share it.

I feel like i have just built up to some kind of an ask, this would be the part of the proposal where i would present what i am asking for, i think i have wrote too many proposals of late that my mind just reverts to this type of writing.  But that is not what this is about!  This is about recognizing our privilege and sharing it.  I think the best way to start doing that is to work on developing relationships with people outside of our privilege levels.  We are really just recreating the cast system here based not on tradition, or birth but by money (not that tradition and birth do not play the main roles in coming out on top)  And then we sit and judge other societies and call them primitive, where we are in fact becoming more primitive then ever they way we allow our lives to get controlled by so few.

But i digress, maybe this whole thing is just a digression!  but there it is!