Yeah, you’re right. We all know this particularly if we’ve been around long enough to both win and lose a number of times. One of the things that you have to learn to keep going is that it’s mostly the luck of the draw. Figuring what effect you actually had in the success or failure of any project is the most important but also the most depressing. It’s actually a good day when you wake up and fully understand that you’re replaceable and often irrelevant. You don’t stop then but start looking at how to be incrementally important with everyone else. Success is much better shared because that’s what really happens. And most times you only succeed in not failing.

But the privilege is either there or it isn’t. And you have to live with that, too. That is really the luck of the draw. We need to remove that as much as possible but we also must realize that we are countering evolution and consciously changing our species characteristics. The continuous fight over racism that is now escalated by the knee jerk reaction of the Trump voters is depressing because we’ve been fighting it so long and we thought it was getting better but those of us who are white and privileged didn’t realize that only the surface changed. Now it seems I’m being attacked and have been struggling to explain this to people who insist there is no privilege and no racism almost daily.

But the thing that is haunting me is the superficiality of their arguments. Here in Medium I take whatever response, excluding simple shouting, at face value and try to respond with appropriate logic or admit my error if I can’t. But the problem is people who only parrot talking points. Yes, I know that’s the nature of Trumpkins but I expect better here. I’m talking about people who try to martial data or stake out some rational argument but are almost completely unable to defend it without resorting to silence or STFU. This is really starting to look like a disease.

This actually relates to the issue of privilege. I’m privileged to have been educated to argue and write this way and I’m privileged to have had both success and recognition and failures that I could count as education. Because of those things I’ve never really worried about making it. And I know most people never have that privilege and there is no rational reason for that to be the case. I’m trying to change that but after all these years we’re suddenly fighting the most primitive reversion to warlordism that relies on accepting chaos as the norm. It’s every person for themselves and their hope is to find a lord who can kill the others and give them some of their’s. Nothing else matters. To fight that will mean writing off the people infected. That is what I’m struggling with. To write even sone of them off is to completely dismiss them. Of course many of the people infected are and have been shouting this for some time. They will have no second thoughts but we are all pulled back into that world. That cannot be allocated the status of a political opinion. That cannot be part of the new planetary narrative we are struggling to write. And I’m troubled. . .