Check your privilege

It's easy to get lost in the shuffle of daily life and forget just how much you have.

This rotation I'm in a very rural area with a very high poverty rate. It hits me over the head pretty often that I am incredibly fortunate.

For example: I own an iDevice. Usually I make my grocery list on it. This week I opted to copy it onto a piece of paper because it is incredibly rude (in my view) to flaunt that wealth here. Half of people don't have cars and people live very spread out, sometimes an hour from town (where there's a grocery store, one restaurant, a gas station, post office, and two churches). The post office here is the trailer that has a blue mailbox in front of it, and it's in slightly better shape than almost everywhere people live around here. This is not saying all that much. I spent $30 on supplementary groceries (milk, meat, cheese, frozen green beans, hand soap) and got about half what I would at home. No wonder everyone is broke. There is a wall of canned meat. 10 feet across the bottom and at least 12 feet up. I couldn't find any plain chicken breasts in the store, but I saw the price tag and it was double what I'd pay at home. Chicken thighs with the fattiest skin I've ever seen were on sale for a nearly affordable price.

There is no internet at my place but I can go visit some neighbors and plug into their internet. It's patchy and reasonably slow (no streaming video is possible) but it connects. It's the fastest around here by far, probably double what most people have access to. I have a computer and it works and I get to use it to connect to the world and apply for jobs.

I have this incredibly huge floppy sun hat that I wear when I walk to work. It's objectively hideous in olive green and I love it because it keeps the sun off of my face and I can skip the sunblock since it's UV protective. It blocks my peripheral vision almost totally though. I can see only what's in front of me when I wear it. Then I get to work and take the thing off and I get it. The blinders are off and I see the pack of stray dogs and the spirit behind the people who have a hard time keeping hope.

It's beautiful and raw and painful and hopeful all in a single glance. The blinders are off and my vision has expanded. Privilege checked.