“Privilege.” It is, but not really, a privilege. In nine point nine out of ten cases, proved in an international study I did, “privilege” is a dirty name for someone. The one percent? That’s the rich… and they are… they know it…hope you understand it and don’t care if you don’t.

Someone pointed at my obvious “privilege” not long ago. It pissed me off that he could be so brazen to accuse me of something worthy of a dirty name. But I am. At least by the new dirty name definition, I am. I’m white, I’m male, I’m old. And I have white hair and beard, slowly going…going.

My dad, by the same token, was the same. I’m sure he didn’t know it. There wasn’t any Facebook in 1930. In fact, there was no telephone at his house either, no running water, just a pump in the yard located about 50 yards from the outhouse. He didn’t know Arkansas was the pit of the world. I’m sure he would have requested a different privilege to enjoy, but he probably didn’t know that existed until he started reading books.

He got out of that when he turned seventeen and joined up in the Air Force. This was just a few years after the World War. He didn’t go to school for a degree, but went to a war…a little skirmish in Korea, so he was never officer material, but he did make a career for twenty-three or four years as an NCO. When he retired he was as high up as one could go.

When I was eighteen, I got up one morning to get ready to go to school and my dad was still there. He was never there. He went to work every weekday. He was dressed in his civvies outfit at the breakfast table eating his bacon and reading the newspaper. He was not going to work, he said. He was just a few months from retirement and he told me that day was the first day he ever called in to say he wasn’t coming in today. Twenty-three years and didn’t call in sick once…one of the things I remember from my dad.

Though he had grown weary of America’s endless war, he felt privileged to have been able to serve. He was not the same gung ho guy after his foray into Southeast Asia in 1966. He recognized the lies and the trickery that benefited the rich. At the height of his career, he probably made $1500 a month. He started selling insurance part-time his last few years in the Air Force and he made more money in a day, sometimes, than he did in a month in the Air Force. I think he thought he was rich. And I know he thought of himself as privileged to have been able to have a family and the comforts of a home and a chance to allow his kids to spend our childhood years in as diverse a world as was possible then.

I got to see clearly my American privilege as a teenager in Taiwan. We lived in a mansion, compared to what we had ever had before and especially compared to the local folks. And I was a teenager, I rarely got caught, but if I had been caught for all my transgressions, the slate would never be clean. I was just like all the other teenage boys. We were smoking in the boys’room and all that goes with it. And we rode in taxis to school, we bought whatever kind of cigarette we wanted, Chinese beer or wine or drug at the drug store. All of those privileges were universal for the American kids there and the Air Force has always been pretty damned diverse.

Every kid there was privileged, we knew it, we were proud of it. I suppose I flaunted my privilege often, it felt like a birth rite almost. And it was. I was an American kid there with my family doing the protection thing like we do. And we needed that place to give the privileged nineteen-year-old kid who got to get a little respite from the war in little bits and pieces when they could get a little R&R in a place where there weren’t hordes of folk shooting at them. That was probably the height or privilege

I’ve been privileged. I didn’t pick it, but I live it and I will, from now on, put being called “privileged” on the plus side of the ledger. I hope everyone can enjoy “privilege” and I’ll help as I can.