Are you slightly privileged?

I'm white. I'm lower-middle-classed. I'm a male. I'm slightly privileged.

"History which keeps alive the memory of people's resistance suggests new definitions of power. By traditional definitions, whoever possesses military strength, wealth, command of official ideology, cultural control, has power. Measured by these standards, popular rebellion never looks strong enough to survive.

However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.

That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see what we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attica-expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain control, kill us."

~Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, Chapter 23, page 633


"What can I do to change things?" What can't you do? If Prof. Zinn is correct, the majority of the people I know in my life have all the true power. We have been doped, by the Establishment, into think we don't.

"Okay fine, but what can I DO?" I think the simplest of answers has to be: Cut down on your waste. Debt is wasted money. Cable is wasted time. Car pool to work. Share a meal between two people at a restaurant. The guards of the system live way outside their means. It is the greatest weapon the Establishment has to control us. If we all began eliminating the "waste" in our lives, they would have less control over us.

In all seriousness, "VIVA LA PEOPLE, VIVA LA REVOLUTION!"

It starts TODAY. It starts with ME. It starts with US.