Facing My Privilege: The End of a Journey

Anyone who has left behind the comfort of privilege and thrust themselves into a situation that we might call "unjust" or in "poverty" understands the wave of emotions that rolls over as you are faced with the realities of our world. Stepping into a homeless camp, a "third world" country,  or even a prison, as part of the privileged class, I was taught first to feel pity and sadness for the unfortunate situation before my eyes and gratitude for the situation I left behind at home.

As you dive deeper into the injustice, you realize that this pity and gratitude you have been taught to feel can be detrimental and hurtful to many people and therefore begin to leave behind these first reactions to excavate new truths that inspire new emotions. Learning of the connections between my own country and the civil war and poverty that occurred and is still occurring in Guatemala, seeing the connection between health and poverty in the United States, understanding the relationship between politics, business, and the provision of medical technology, understanding the economic control exerted over countries or communities in order to exploit and use the poor, crime connected to prejudice, prejudice connected to history, cultural norms that disregard some humans while affording advantage to others for arbitrary characteristics, accepted realities of competition, profit mongering, selfishness, ignorance, hatred and finally the realization that our world functions on systems that are so complex, so intricate, so compounding, that it is impossible to articulate or even imagine what a world might look like in which each human was treated with love, value, and joy, all come together to create an overwhelming, distressing, and frustrating gauntlet between us and the realization of a loving world.

Anger, frustration, pain, and guilt emerge each time I find myself in these situations, as I sit in realization that even in my attempts to approach poverty, human rights violations, and injustice in a way that breaks the norm of dependency and subverts control over the poor, I, a white cis-male US citizen, from a middle class family, many times simply reinforce and sometimes further the oppressive system in place. I cannot separate myself completely from the world in which I was formed, from the unchanging "truths" of western culture and the culture of the United States. It seems that I cannot step back from myself and sift through these truths and find which ones are valuable and which are not. It feels almost impossible to discover which ideals hurt and harm the people around me and know then that I should leave those behind. When you pull on one string of injustice, three more appear, when you try to pull the choking vine from the tree, branches fall on your head.

We become overwhelmed and saturated with the complexity, jaded by the constant uphill battle, and frustrated when people simply choose to be selfish, greedy, and deceitful. We feel like single droplets making no difference in the ocean of injustice. As we turn home, we feel broken, incomplete, and sorrowful as we face the privileged situation before our eyes and feel longing, shame, and discomfort for what we leave behind. We recognize that no matter what, we can always return to our safe havens, our comfortable homes, and our distracted lives. We know that we will never be able to feel the full extent of the pain and hardship of those people who are suffering at the behest of our lifestyle of imprisoned consumerism and forced individualism. We always have an escape. We always have a plane ticket out of poverty. We always have a ride waiting for us at the airport when we get home. We throw ourselves onto our soft beds in our warm houses and cry because our privilege permeates even our very blood.

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But then, as you lift your face from your tear-stained feather pillow, as you feel the wounds from standing next to the oppressed, the broken pieces of yourself laying around you, and the voids in your soul calling for fulfillment, the faces of the many people you met along the way emerge, little by little tending to your wounds, aiding your recovery, sorting the pieces of yourself into piles to keep and piles to throw away.

You allow the smile of a young shoe shiner to leave its mark on your soul through compassion, reminding you of his passion for learning, his dedication to his family, and his ability to simply sit in peace even at 10 years old.

You feel the care and guidance of the powerful spirit of your mentor, an occupational therapist with a heart for true solidarity and mind for true understanding, helping pick up the pieces of yourself that were broken, putting them back together, maybe in new places with new purposes.

You feel the embrace of a new friendship emerge from an unexpected relationship, holding your hand as you drive along the hard road of analysis, understanding, and true recognition of the complexity of oppression, pain, and anger.

You feel the energy of humans colliding together from all sides of the planet to learn, grow, and change with one another, opening up themselves to the souls of others.

You hear the laughter of new friends echoing off the cobblestones of an old colonial city, sending vibrations of hope through the hardest of stones.







You see light peek over the mountain of pain and injustice before you, reminding you that there is hope, there is joy, and there is a possibility for a better future.

You touch the scars from your past wounds, reminders that the wounds of the oppressed don't often have the time or privilege of healing into scars. You are reminded that the work is never done, and you have been forever changed. You hear the call to return to solidarity, to leave your privileged life, give back what has been stolen from the deprivileged people of our world. As you look in the mirror to see who you have become and what you might provide to our world, your ears are forever tuned to the cries for human dignity and human rights.

You bring your past experiences with you as tools for the future, filling you with the fuel of passion, driving you to stand up, open your windows and your heart, and scream to the world that you are ready for change, ready to be a small part of a body, walking toward justice, taking on the challenge of imagining the potential for a better world alongside your fellow humans. You are ready to listen with your whole being, to be moved by the poor and shaped by the suffering. You realize as you turn to face your privilege that, although it affects your life so much,  it does not have the final word.





You are ready to reclaim what it means to be human,  what it means to be a part of the human community. You are ready to make the final word something much more powerful than privilege: love.