2-4-10

Everybody wants to be special. Everyone wants a history in which there is struggle. At least that's what I get from the people in my "All Power to the People" class. It was literally the Oppression Olympics in that class, with people competing for who had the most troubling ancestry. That in itself is sick. The daughters of lawyers and chemists were complaining of how hard it was for relatives that they didn't even know, and how it so deeply affected them. You're Sicilian? Irish? That doesn't seem so troubling. Because for everybody with the exception of a couple people that are passing the century mark counts you as white. And sadly, if you're white and have parents that make it to where you're above the poverty mark, you shouldn't be complaining. Your people are not in jeopardy, below the poverty line and being persecuted every day for the color of their skin. Be happy that you have that privilege, and not split hairs to make yourself seem more interesting.
I think I'm white. That's the overwhelming majority of what I am. But I can't get away with saying that, because the color of my skin says otherwise. I have it extremely good and I'm not going to complain. Sure, people every now and then refuse to believe that I'm not Mexican, but what are you going to do? Come down on them because they are persecuting me for that lack of heritage? No. Life's too short to sweat the small stuff and get pissed at every social injustice. I'm white with some Choctaw and I'm not going to let the very little "heritage" that I have precede me. My ethnicity shouldn't shape what I do as a person and I'm sure as hell not going to make anybody feel sorry for me.
People forget that we are essentially all part of the same race. The human race. It's meaningless to bicker about how tough everyone has it. We all have it hard. Life can be short and brutish, and wallowing in self pity for most of it because your great-great grandfather got called a mick is just for the lack of a better word, stupid.