Today I Learned

I had a lot of issues growing up. Neurodivergent kid in rural Ohio in the '80s, lots of conservative people around, abusive people in my family making stuff hard for much of my young childhood, and a number of other things. I wanted the same thing anyone joining a gang wants, really. Acceptance, feeling like I belong, and feeling like I was fighting something or for something better.

I came from a place where I, very much without knowing it, was very entitled and privileged. I was kept away from others a lot as a kid (lived with my grandparents for a bit and wasn't allowed to play with the other neighbors (who were in my class) because they were not white. Other perspectives were few and far between when and where I grew up. There are some other reasons that there were huge gaps in my critical thinking and bullshit detection (partly due to not questioning people in power and getting heavily punished when I did). I got taken advantage of a lot when I first got out on my own and had to basically do a lot of lessons that most kids/teens learned as an adult with much more dire consequences.

I felt like I was working hard and that others' failures were because they didn't work hard enough (and that I didn't work hard enough when I was failing). In reality, a lot of people attribute way too much of their success to their own skill not luck and circumstance. At the same time I was thinking other people were lazy, I was also helped by some of my family through some financial hard times more than once (though I was briefly homeless another time). I came to realize, as I met more and varied people, that some of the hardest workers I knew were getting fucked over. Two jobs, caring deeply about their families, and barely able to tread water to support themselves and those that relied on them.

Contradictions between people claiming to be christians and anything that christ would have done. People thinking they were holy and great for holding some coat drive and stuff, but any tax dollars for a safety net were just terrible and those people were just going to spend it on drugs. People who kept pulling up every bit of safety because "fuck you, I've got mine", for lack of a better term was just more and more visible when I looked at what was going on. Also being out on my own and working when 9/11 happened and the crazy amounts of hate and racism that followed that. I slowly started actually seeing all of these things, losing that entitlement, not othering people, and realizing things for what they were. I traveled to other places, saw other ways of life. The early internet and chatting people from around the world via IRC and the like also played a role in that.

Living as a minority in another country (I moved to Japan in my early 30s), getting randomly stopped and searched, struggling to find housing, and other things also cemented many of the other things I had already been learning. I am a deeply empathetic person, but I had always assumed that everyone was acting in good faith in a lot of situations and that merit would see me treated "properly". That's not the reality. The reality is that people are messy and flawed, that people are mostly good but often wary. This can manifest as racism in the guise of "protecting our culture and way of life" where those others getting stopped and searched (often in front of their communities, peers, clients, etc. who have no idea what is going on and assume the worst) was just a mild inconvenience. That experience in particular showed me exactly what white, male privilege in the US was. I could never see it clearly since I always had it.

This is a very long and rambling response. I guess the TL;DR would be seeing my own entitlement and privilege, realizing that people in power and authority often don't get there through merit and/or hard work alone (if at all), and generally getting more experience and seeing and experiencing inequity.