My understanding of what "privilege" means

So, elsewhere on LiveJournal, I'm in an argument about the term "privilege". And I unfortunately finally lost my cool about it. Oops.

But it gives me an opportunity to see if I can't lay out my understanding of the concept, and get your comments on it.
( Read more... )

Dear Afghanis:

Look, I know you're probably upset at how many innocent Afghanis we shoot in our war in your country, but I want to let you know it's not personal.

We do it in our own country, too.

(In the Empire State Building shooting, the shooter killed his boss. The police shot everybody else -- the shooter, and nine bystanders.)

Lis has a very Yankee thrifty side to her.

Lis hates replacing things if she can help it. The "Q" key on our keyboard started working only intermittently yesterday, and stopped entirely today.

Naturally, my response to this was to rephrase things I was writing to avoid words with "q" in it. But when Lis started using the computer, she was unwilling to go with this workaround.

Fine, I said. Let's go out and get a new keyboard.

No, Lis said. This is a $50 keyboard. We're going to at least ATTEMPT to get the "q" key working before we throw it out. A $10 keyboard? Sure. We can replace that. And, well, in a $10 keyboard, it's pretty trivial to fix a sticking key, anyway. This, however, is a pretty fancy ergonomic keyboard. But, nonetheless, even though this will be a much more involved fix than a normal keyboard fix, we're going to try fixing it.

So we did.

Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q Q. Just sayin'.

Edited to add:
Well, that was embarrassing. Half an hour after I posted this, the keyboard died entirely. Not only did "Q" cease working, but every other key did as well. *sigh*

We ended up going out to Staples to buy a new keyboard after all.

But the thing is, from Lis's point of view, the IMPORTANT thing was that we TRIED. She doesn't like being part of a disposable culture, so it's important to at least ATTEMPT to repair things. We made a good attempt, and it worked fine for half an hour, so we were at least CLOSE. And that's what's important to Lis: that we try to avoid filling landfills when we can -- understanding that we won't always succeed.