Privilege

If by "privilege" we mean "having the good fortune to do better than a life characterized by want, disease, poverty, corruption and the occasional wild animal attack," then I guess I must accept the label, despite my misgivings about it - the world's desperately poor should be considered deprived and straited, not the baseline that only injustice allows us to exceed. But if we are going to continue to use "privilege" as a pejorative, and freight it with the implication that a consistent roof over ones' head, indoor plumbing and minor luxuries (that are nearly ubiquitous across entire continents by now) are prima-facie evidence of deliberate complicity in a hateful plot against those noble souls who must labor ceaselessly simply to remain impoverished, rather than dead (primarily because their governments are some combination of incompetent and iniquitous), then I'll pass, rather than have to consistently plead that any given dollar that I might possess wasn't greedily pried from the thin, hungry fingers of an indigent victim while their destitute children looked on.