Tag Archives: Privilege

Courage at Twilight: The After Words (Privilege)

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For every day of this caregiving experience, I have been conscious of the blessings, the resources, the benefits, the privileges that shaped and enabled the experience.  By “privileged” I simply mean to indicate our relative place on that vast spectrum of personal resources, our being somewhere in the in-between of those with tragically few resources and those with unnecessarily huge resources.  My caregiving experience, and my father’s and mother’s experience as the cared-for, undeniable was shaped and even determined by our relative resources.  My father’s pension allowed us to hire private-pay home health care and hospice, which sent aides for two hours a day, seven days a week, including holidays, for the last two years (about $30,000 per year).  To be sure, the costs ate away steadily at my parents’ savings, but the fact remains that they had savings, whereas many do not.  Not having this resource would have made my caregiving experience impossible, at least for me.  Add to our privileges the ability to purchase a $14,000 chair lift for the staircase.  While the lift was a major hit to our budget, we had the budget.  Add the blessings of medical insurance, prescription insurance, and social security.  Include the allowance I was given to work a flexible work schedule, which enabled me to cook healthy from-scratch meals from fresh ingredients.  While I am only a small-town government lawyer, my professional knowledge and social clout did clear obstacles others struggle to break through.  Our relative privileges do nothing to reduce the legitimacy or reality of my experience and my story.  But they do shape that story.  A lack of these resources would have dramatically altered the experience, and dramatically multiplied the stress and trauma, and I acknowledge the difficulties faced by persons with fewer resources.  I am not a community organizer, and offer no social solutions, but I am aware of some of the challenges and struggles faced by many.  It may be a cop out to say I would not have been up to the task without our resources, but I fear I would not have been up to the task.

(Pictured: funeral planter from the Tooele City Mayor and City Council.)

Courage at Twilight: Getting to Know the Neighborhood

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After more than a month, I finally managed a bike ride, not on a pretty mountain trail, but on the neighborhood streets.  What lay beyond the mechanized gate was a mystery to me, though hundreds of noisily cars and trucks come and go daily, each stopping to provide identification.  The guard raised the gate with a friendly wave, and I passed into Pepperwood.  I rode on quiet winding streets with quiet expansive yards and quiet splendorous houses, pushing up steep hills and careening down—the radar speed limit sign clocked me at 29 mph in a 25-mph zone.  I pondered on the Pepperwood privilege even as I admired the expensive yards and houses.  Lincolns and Cadillacs in the driveways.  Tennis courts and pools in the back yards.  Turrets and wrought iron fences.  I am uncomfortable with money, perhaps because I don’t have much.  I do not begrudge these people—I know many of them, and they are law-abiding, religious, and kind—but I cannot help comparing their power and privilege with humans of equal worth who have none of this wealth.  But then, am not I also privileged, riding my mountain bike on a paid holiday with a salary and insurance and a 401(k)?  Yes, I am.  Privilege is no single condition, but a spectrum, a sliding scale, a degreed thermometer, and we are all both blessed and cursed with it to some degree.  This is what we must beware: privilege turning into pride.  Pride is humanity’s downfall.  Such were some of my thoughts as I sweated uphill and thrilled downhill and watched for cars zipping out of driveways and watched for mule deer pronking across the narrow streets far inside the gates.