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.

If you find yourself in agreement with a dominant belief - the most popular religion in your culture, a love of the favored local sports team, or the belief that life is mostly neat and people are mostly good-hearted - you may occasionally have trouble distinguishing someone who doesn’t lick your butt in agreement from someone who is actually attacking you. This post includes tips on how to tell various members of “Them” apart.

First of all, let’s discuss the source of your confusion. The most common reason for thinking people are either with you or against you is that you don’t realize that some people actually arrive at their own opinions rather than just adopting other people’s opinions in a show of solidarity. If you’re an opinion adopter, you may tend to assume another person’s shifting opinions are meant to passively-aggressively signal shifting loyalties. You may feel the person is abandoning your team for another team. In fact, some people engage in a process called “thinking” by which they evaluate how much logical sense an idea makes. They may re-evaluate the idea when they obtain new life experience or knowledge. It doesn’t mean they hate you or want your beliefs to fail or want you to stop believing as you do.

Remember: there are other ways for a person to be a good and loyal friend or colleague to you than by mirroring your beliefs back to make you feel good about yourself.

When your adopted opinions and beliefs are mainstream, you feel safe. You believe that everyone feels the same pressure you felt to conform, and that everyone is shares the weakness that forced you to conform. Therefore when someone doesn’t conform, you think they’re some kind of crazed monster - a dangerously fucked up nutjob. You feel entitled to lash out in attack. In fact, some people have a trait called strength which enables them to feel pressure from others without giving in. They know people want them to echo their beliefs back to them like a tape recorder, but they have their own ideas. They’re (usually) not doing it to spite you; they just really see things differently.

Critics

Critics break down ideas into chains of logical thought, then evaluate how sound that logic is. For example, the critic will not accept that “the hole in the ozone is for Jesus to come through” as a logical precept because there is no logic: it’s just an idea you’ve chosen to embrace. The critic is not saying you can’t embrace it, nor is the critic (necessarily) saying it’s a stupid thing to believe (though I have made the argument that if Jesus needs help from hairspray manufacturers to make His Second Coming, perhaps He is not All That). The critic is merely saying you have offered no persuasive reason or fact to compel him to agree with you. It would be absolutely inappropriate at this point to spray paint his car with the word “Fornicator” or similar.

Non-supporters

Boy, these guys have it rough. They don’t even want to criticize your beliefs or debate with you. They just want to live and let live. Unfortunately, they’re a Democrap in a Repubican region or vice versa. Or they’re a Muslim in Christian redneck heaven. Or they’re a woman/person of color/gay person/etc. who, when asked for an opinion, gives one instead of saying cheerily, “Gosh, I dunno, but I sure trust Mr. Cracker to know what’s best for me. I’ll just go over here and be harmless, ‘kay?”

My advice here, based on years of personal experience and careful consideration, is simply leave these people the fuck alone. I mean, what damage do you actually think they’re doing to you? They don’t even want to talk to you! You just come over and start telling them your opinions with the expectation that because everything you think is mainstream they will say, “Oh yeah, me too!” and when they don’t, you’re so bothered by the fact there’s somebody on this earth who just blithely doesn’t have to agree with everyone else to function, you can’t stand it, so you decide to harass them daily. And even if they say they agree with you to make you go away, you know it’s not true, so you keep harassing them for no other reason than punishment.

Can you not see that you need psychiatric help? You do. Not them - you.

Hostile people

Now, there are indeed people who are hostile to mainstream beliefs just to irritate you, or to maintain the belief they are cool, or whatever. These people are rare, but they exist. These are the people you can feel entitled to fight with or dislike, and you will recognize them because:

• Unlike critics, they can’t offer logical arguments about their beliefs/opinions, i.e., can’t tell you why they think what they think.
• Unlike non-supporters, they change their beliefs again if everyone starts agreeing with them
• Unlike both critics and non-supporters, they harass you with their beliefs all the time in order to irritate you. (Note: “harass” doesn’t mean “expresses their weirdass beliefs right out in public instead of in darkened basements, where such ideas belong”; it refers to an actual pattern of intentionally bugging the hell out of you, specifically, on a regular basis.)

In other words, they’re exactly like you. Except they feel they’ve got a score to settle, and their chosen method is rebellion. It’s not a sincere rebellion, it’s just rebelling to annoy people. Because they’re pricks and you’re a prick too, I highly recommend that you guys engage in an escalating pattern of violence until you remove each other from the overburdened ecosystem.

“Won’t somebody please think of the children???”

- The preacher’s wife on the Simpsons

I recently made the mistake of engaging in a business transaction with a Christian who believes that, because s/he is a Christian everything s/he does is unquestionably the Lord’s work, s/he cannot possibly have done me wrong. It’s not the first time this has happened to me, and sadly, it caused me to revisit my tolerance policy and decide that, until things in the US change, I will not engage in business with Christians if I can avoid it. It’s unfortunate since some of them are genuinely good people, and Christians are certainly not the only ones operating with that sense of entitlement. But as it happens, Christianity is a great disguise in the current US climate for people who want to screw folks right over with impunity.

Here’s the mechanism I perceive to be at work with these individuals. They have a powerful streak of entitlement they’re not comfortable expressing overtly, so they subvert it into the service of a cause they perceive as so noble no one would ever take issue with their actions, then they go forth and fight for their cause in exactly the way someone who thinks himself God’s gift goes forth and fights with anyone who won’t bow down to him.

Some of these people get in your face with their cause, relying on your desire not to “make a scene” to trap you into listening to their spiel, maybe giving them some money to go away. Others lie, cheat and steal, and justify it all with “But it’s for the children/God/the poor/the hungry.” In the worst case, they start crusades and holy wars. All with a perfectly clean conscience, because they believe they’re being unselfish.

But they’re not; they’re just transferring their “self” onto a cause, and then behaving in a privileged, entitled manner on behalf of of the cause rather than on behalf of their own ego. But the cause is their ego-extension, so they’re really no better than someone with a hugely swollen ego feeling entitled to take whatever he wants from lesser beings.

What happens in your mind when you’re a small child and you notice that Santa brought the rich kids much nicer stuff than he brought the poor kids? I’ve always wondered about this. (I don’t know because I was never taught to believe in Santa.)

It seems to me there’s a potential for the whole Santa myth to reaffirm for kids the idea that rich people deserve better at such a young age the kids are mentally defenseless against it. Because here’s an outsider who’s not supposed to be an asshole bigot, who’s not constrained by financial limitations, and even he thinks the poor kids should be content with much-needed new underwear while the big kids get giant, flashy, expensive stuff that flaunts wealth through impracticality.

But I don’t know. Maybe for those of you raised to believe in Santa, there are enough suspicions and rumors abounding for you not to take it so seriously?

Apparently my spam filter got hold of some steroids a couple of weeks ago and proceeded to filter every comment. I believe I’ve recovered everything. Sorry about that! I’m not sure why it did that, but I’ll monitor it every day until it’s straightened out.

Being nice should mean being genuinely kind, caring and empathetic. But in reality, the standard’s much lower. Just saying “please” and “thank you”, tucking your shirt in and failing to commit violent crimes can win you the “nice” label.

And yet we put huge amounts of value on that label. “Nice” young men can avoid rape convictions even when the jury admits they think they forced sex - because the jury can’t see that forcing sex makes a person not nice, even if he dresses preppy, has a great smile and helps old ladies across the street. Conversely, “nice” young women don’t get raped, and if a woman is raped, it’s instantly taken as proof by these very same people that she wasn’t nice after all. (Of course, many people are not that dense; I’m just illustrating a point with what I hope are examples familiar to us all.)

And then the jurors in this situation are also “nice”. They clean their teeth, are good neighbors, maybe go to church. Juries who flat-out state that they believe there was forced sex but that’s what the slut deserved somehow do not get disqualified from “nice”. They don’t go home to find their neighbors turning a cold shoulder… because the neighbors are also “nice”.

Throughout history, “nice” people have had slaves when it was the trend. “Nice” people have decided to believe other “nice” people incapable of abuse when accused (usually by women, children, or people of lesser race, class, orientation or other privilege). “Nice” people think it’s rude when, after they’ve nosed into someone’s personal business with the question “Why don’t you love Christmas like nice people do?” and the person tells the all-too-common truth: “Because my family always had knock-down drag-out fights on Christmas”.

Gosh, “civilization is supposed to shield “nice” people from unpleasant truths! How dare someone violate the sanctity of ignorance! Never mind that something like 1 in 5 children are sexually molested before they reach 16, and the vast majority of “nice” people are deluded into thinking they know no one who either was molested or committed molestation. Thus perpetuating the cycle.

“Nice” in this context means “privileged” - nothing more, nothing less. It’s the mechanism that allows raging maniacs to declare that they’re super-nice guys and women are stupid, filthy hos for not begging to suck them off and get all sorts of sympathy. Being “nice” alleviates your responsibility to fix a system which benefits you at the expense of others.

“Nice” allows that minority of truly evil people - the ones who actively create situations of slavery, abuse, discrimination, etc. - to go much further than they would have without the enabling of nice folks who “see no evil”, and imagine they can “do no evil” just because they never forget birthdays.

I hate “nice” people. I know that’s not very nice of me, but I prefer someone whose motto is “see all evil, hear all evil, fight all evil.”

One of the most annoying privilege memes I’ve ever dealt with is “Anyone can get rich in this great country; if they don’t, it means they’re just not working hard enough.” I encountered this meme almost daily as a kid growing up in a highly conservative “red state” in the US, but I imagine there are variations of it all over the world. The basic idea: “This society is working out great for me; if it’s not for you, that might mean we need to make changes, and that could mean I would lose something, and I don’t want to, so I’m going to blame you. If this society isn’t working for you, it’s your fault.”

If my needs have been easily met my whole life - not just for food and shelter but for things like dignity and fair chances - I may be less likely to notice that you, in my very same society, are not getting yours met. It never occurs to me that other you could be making the same efforts in life but getting a different result, right in my backyard.

I don’t realize how privileged I am.

And my privilege to be in the favored group creates another privilege: my philosophy of life need not account for the lives of Others, i.e., people not in my favored group. What about all the people working 2 jobs - more if they can get them - and never getting ahead? Are they not “anyone” and are they not “working hard enough”?

“Well, they’ve made bad choices,” I say, pictuing unattractive middle aged women and people of color slaving away in restuarants or factories or as maids and janitors. I don’t even think of potentially lethal jobs in coal mines and oil rigs because I don’t see those places. I picture these Others getting themselves criminal records or unexpected baby mouths to feed, because they made bad choices. I don’t think about the time Daddy got my arrest record expunged so I wouldn’t get kicked out of college. I don’t think about how my sister handled her unexpected high school pregnancy so it wouldn’t affect her future. No, the choices made by people Like Me are justified by the end result. The choices made by Others are condemned by the end result.

But they’re frequently the same damn choices.

The fact is, some poor people do make bad choices. But some of the most powerful, rich and successful people in my country have made the very same choices - drug abuse, running over pedestrians while driving drunk, gambling, wasting money like crazy, unplanned pregnancies. If these choices don’t have a consistent result in the life of everyone who makes them, they can’t be the cause of the effect that is poverty.

But I don’t have to consider any of that. I can just dismiss you as argumentative and go watch some mainstream news channel which reaffirms my view that all is right in the world. There is no mainstream channel that reaffirms the viewpoint of Others: and that’s their own damn fault because they haven’t created those channels or proven themselves a valuable consumer group to market to. All is right in my little world.