While it shouldn’t be a privilege to escape abuse in this life, there are trappings of privilege for those who have been so lucky. I know it’s an odd thing to say, and it’s a realization I’ve been slowly moving toward since childhood, but it works like this:

• Once you survive abuse or violation, you have a knowledge of the human capacity for nastiness that others around you don’t share.
• It is your duty to keep them blissfully ignorant at the expense of your own soul.
• When they chatter on about how disgraceful it is for a child not to be on speaking terms with his family, you are a rude asshole if you remind them that the abuse rate in the US and most countries is staggering, so maybe the child had good reason.
• When you’re the child they’re complaining about, no one will take your side if you try to explain to them six ways from Sunday why it’s much, much better for everyone that you have no contact with your parent/family/ex-husband, or eventually give up and tell the person to mind its own business.
• If you try to tell your friends that their latest crush shows signs of being violent or abusive, they’ll hate you. If you turn out to be right, they’ll hate you more.

And so on, and so forth. Honestly, if I go through every example, I’ll get too depressed to finish the article. Most of them come from personal experience.

And this - more than anything - is why I hate human beings. Because out of those of you who’ve had the good fortune not to be abused or violated in your lifetime, maybe 1 in 1,000 can be bothered to muster sympathy for those who have. Oh, if you see an abused child on Oprah you cry your heart out, sure. But I’m talking about putting the feelings of a survivor ahead of your own when they’re right there in your face.

When they’re someone you know; someone very much like you. When you get that crumpled feeling in the gut that it’s only random chance it was them and not you, and your first instinct is to explain away why it happened to them (and could therefore never happen to you). Or deny that it happened at all. Or have the awkward sympathetic moment you find yourself trapped in, but immediately pull back to superficiality with this person you once called friend.

When you make some ignorant comment about abuse and someone corrects you with a story from her own experience and your first instinct is to prove her wrong, maybe the “greenest” thing you could do for the environment is become part of it already. Yeah, I’m so gosh darn mean, but goddamnit, this needs to be said.

Those of us who’ve experienced abuse, rape and other violations don’t keep it quiet because we’re ashamed. Or because it’s intensely personal. The main reason we keep it quiet is because we know how you’ll treat us if we tell you. We know you have a culturally-granted privilege to remain ignorant. To not know, and therefore not to be responsible. Not to bother. Not to think about it.

And certainly not to do anything that might help stop or at least curtail it somewhat in the future.

But you are responsible. If you’re not aware that statistically a certain percentage of the people you know must have experienced physical, emotional or sexual abuse at some point in their lives, you are helping the perpetrators of those crimes keep working in the shadows. Because as long as you imagine the problem doesn’t really touch anyone you know, the problem stays hidden.

I saw on a forum the other day some people discrediting a study about rape statistics. “If this study is true,” one poster said, “then about a fourth of the women I know must have been raped at some point, and that’s just not true.” How can anyone think that because a fourth of the women he knows haven’t told him, “Oh, by the way, I’ve been raped before” they must not have been? The answer is: they can’t. They’re beating the knowledge to the punch. They’re shouting in every way they can, “You will not drag me kicking and screaming to the realization that life isn’t fair and I’m one lucky shit not to have suffered worse than I have!”

He might as well help round up victims for abusers. He’s perpetuating the unfairness by perpetuating the silence.

As long as you’re more concerned about your right to be in la-la land denial than someone else’s right not to go through hell, you are fighting on the abuser’s side.

The fact that this is a privilege you are granted through the culture which dictates that abuse victims should lie rather than tell Nice People an uncomfortable truth says something odious about the culture. We are a culture of abuse. We believe strongly in the rights of the best-funded 5% to rule over the less-funded and harder-working 95%. We convince ourselves it’s only natural if certain people, defined by such superficialities as gender and skin color rather than important traits like capability or good judgment, should rule. We convince ourselves that cleaning lady who works two jobs just to make ends meet couldn’t possibly have had the cure for cancer locked in her brain behind a lack of education, so no big loss of potential there!

It’s all part of the same thing. As soon as you decide it’s okay for some people to carry double and triple burdens so that others may carry nothing at all, you have decided abuse is pretty neat and you’re all for it. And if that’s the case, all I’m asking is that you shuck off your privilege and take responsibility for the decision you’ve made and the side you’ve taken.

Ignorance is not “nice.” It’s not “good people.” It’s not “I was just trying to have a nice dinner party, why’d she go and bring up a thing like that when all we were doing was saying how gosh awful wonderful the person who abused her is and how much we’d all like to see him elected God.” Ignorance is the hammer in the hand of oppression.

I just got notice that my landlord is raising my rent by $500 (after a $130 increase just this February, and an increase every year since my lease expired and he refused to renew it). Interestingly, this is above market value for what the building offers. This is an increase well in excess of 25%. There is no logical way to justify the price, and it’s called “rent gouging.”

It is also 100% legal in California, given the building was built later than 1978 (otherwise rent control limits increases to 4-5% per annum). Now I finally understand why dozens of older buildings in my neighborhood have been demolished in the past few years, only to have new apartment buildings constructed in their place: you make up the enormous cost of construction pretty quickly by skirting laws that regulate what you can charge for rent.

“Oh,” you say, “but the free market balances. Supply and demand! It’s only fair!”

Not so much when the item being sold is a life necessity. If I feel a Wii system is overpriced, I can shop for a bargain, buy it used, or not buy it at all, and I’ll live. With housing, frugalities eventually become dangerous as you chase affordable living into dangerous areas and dilapidated buildings that qualify as “slums.” And even in those conditions, you remain at the mercy of a landlord who legally has the right to charge you anything he wants.

I mentioned that this increase puts my building above its market value. By that I mean: for what he intends to charge, I could get any of a dozen nearby buildings that have far better amenities. He’s totally outclassed in this new price range. While lots of apartments in L.A. are suddenly raising rents by $100, he’s going for this insane amount, and why? Obviously, I don’t know, but I’m guessing he’s gambling that other owners will look at his prices and bump theirs up accordingly. After all, that’s what they normally do.

Because the suppliers only look at each other for their cues. The demanders don’t even enter the equation. And that’s how you get an entire housing market that is “overvalued”. Suppliers looking at their costs, and passing on the costs of fixing their stupid mistakes (ARM mortgages, anyone?) onto the demand side rather than having to sell or let the bank foreclose. If they built Playstations that weren’t worth what they charge, people would stop buying. But with an essential like housing, there’s infinite room for “whoops” on the supply side - it can always be passed onto the demand side.

Think about it: how do you get “overvalue” in a free market? How can all housing be getting sold at prices above its value, if the market works like its average proponent claims? Answer: it doesn’t work the way people want to believe. Not on necessities.

“But shoes are necessities,” you muse. “Why are there always cheap, affordable shoes available in Los Angeles, but not cheap, affordable housing?”

Because shoes are portable. I can order them from another country, if no store will sell what I want at a price I find acceptable. Even life-saving medicines can sometimes be bought on the cheap from elsewhere. But housing is part of the landscape. It’s tied to our jobs, which also aren’t portable. It’s tied to our kids’ schools, which represent their chance of future economic success. It’s tied into everything we need to survive, and that makes it infinitely exploitable - but only from the supply side.

My situation is atypical. What we’re seeing right now in L.A. is a lot of buildings raising rents by $1-200/month. Because they’re all doing it at once, of course the market will bear it: the demanders have no cheaper options. But why did they start raising the rents? Did the demand side do something to trigger it? No.

• A lot of landlords have those insane mortgages because they opted to tear down old buildings in the past 5 years and put up new ones to avoid that 1978 cut-off date. While individuals who took out those mortgages are losing their homes, landlords just pass on their huge business mistakes to the demand side. There’s infinite room for stupid on the supply side when it comes to housing.
• Unavoidable costs for things like water and electricity are also going up - there, I don’t have a problem with landlords raising rents, as the retail cost is still based on the wholesale cost. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen rents go down when the cost of water or electricity does, which bears examination.

Regulate the market just a little, and profits can still be thrilling without individuals being at the mercy of a subtle version of price fixing.

If anyone’s concerned about me, I’m lucky. My friends who’ve recently had $100 increases in rent are unable to find cheaper housing anywhere nearby, and either have to start paying more or commuting further (taking more time from families, spending more on gas, releasing more gas waste into the atmosphere, having less time for exercise and healthy cooking). Because my building was already overpriced, this was just the kick I needed to go hunt down something significantly cheaper so I have that much more savings per month to throw into my downpayment fund. I intend to buy a house in a couple of years, when the market is at its bottom and housing is actually something like its real market value.

But for those who got drummed out of the housing industry a long time ago - those homeless people who live on all our streets here - that option isn’t available. While some of them may have made bad choices that caused them to end up homeless, the hard reality is: it could happen to anyone in this town. And once you lose your home - even a rented home that was never really “yours” - you lose that address you need to put on a job application. You lose a place to receive mail and communications. You lose touch with the entire world.

All because in a country that could easily provide modest living arrangements for everyone, it is so much more important to have a race to see just how much profit can possibly be made. Isn’t it ever enough?