The Lesser Asshole

When your primary tactic is to berate and shame people into voting for your candidate, you undoubtably have a lousy candidate.

When you ramp up the same tactics that you indignantly claimed were disqualifying when used by supporters of another candidate, namely, attacking and smearing anyone who is not praising your chosen one, your politics are bankrupt.

The language that real champions of the poor and marginalized refined to define and reveal the subtle (or not so subtle) actions and inactions that keep the poor and marginalized poor and marginalized has once again been coopted by the wealthy and powerful. “Privilege,” is now being used by the privileged to attack the privileged for acting privileged.

I am enormously privileged.

I have the privilege of being a member of the race that committed multiple genocides in what would become the United States, not a member of the races of the victims of these genocides.

I have the privilege of identifying as, and being identified as, a member of the dominant gender in the social structures developed in the United States. The gender that has always created and enforced the rules that others are made to live by.

I have the privilege of being born in a rural town gentrified into a desirable suburb to the nearest big city thanks to those socialist highways and marginal public transit.

I have the privilege of growing up in a time when there were good blue-collar jobs available that could generate enough income to support a family of five and that my father had one of those jobs and I had a comfortable, middle class childhood.

I have the privilege of getting a good job with a good company that has decent benefits including health insurance.

I am undoubtedly more privileged than most people.

I am more privileged than the people that are stuck in grossly segregated and underfunded and underperforming public schools that your candidate fought to keep there rather than allow them to be bussed to better schools.

I am more privileged than the people, disproportionally people of color, that your candidate facilitated the imprisonment of with his Crime Bill.

I am more privileged than the majority of the Afghanis, Iraqis, Sudanese, Libyans, Syrians, Pakistanis and countless other nationalities that your candidate incinerated in wars and “actions” and assassinations. The dead and the disfigured and the destitute that lost their livelihoods, their limbs, their lives.

I am more privileged than the tens of thousands of Americans that die annually because they lack health care. Tens of thousands of dead Americans that could not afford health care, because your candidate cares more about maintaining private insurance profits at the expense of those lives. Even with all of my privilege I understand full well the power of the private insurance industry to destroy lives. My “good” insurance stopped paying for my medication a few years ago sending me into a long declining health spiral that landed me disabled for 6 months, largely bedridden. Privilege isn’t everything when someone’s profits are on the line.

I am more privileged than the tens of thousands sent back to their countries of origin by your candidate. Back to poverty, back to harassment, back to brutality, back to death. Simply because they lacked the privilege of being born on the right side of an imaginary line.

I am more privileged than the numerous women whose personal space or intimate privacy your candidate has violated. I have the privilege of not fitting the profile of the people your candidate chooses to victimize, though in this case especially, it is not my privilege that matters, but your candidate’s privilege. His privilege to victimize and not be confronted or challenged or diminished by his actions. His privilege to be believed because of his race, gender, wealth, job, social status.

Of what use is any of my privilege if I don’t use it to stand up to the privilege of your candidate and against the horrible things he perpetrated.

It does not matter to me that he is the lesser asshole.

The privilege to vote, a privilege that many have fought for and died for, and for which many others continue to do so, is a privilege I take seriously. I promised myself when I turned 18 that I would never hold my nose and vote.

If you nominate an asshole, I will not vote for him.

But you won’t care. Because you are acting like my choice to vote for a better candidate is a more horrifying action than a sexual assault, or a racist legal system, or a murdered Iraqi child.