What Privilege Is

A little while ago the internet went nuts on some Princeton student who wrote some dumb thing about how he's not privileged, or he is privileged but doesn't care, or something.  (What he should have said is that everybody at Princeton is privileged, but some are more privileged than others.)

And the internet freaked out about how BookCon is not diverse enough.

And the internet freaks out on a daily basis about something.  You don't have to look very far to find people yelling at each other about "social justice" issues, like what's on James Franco's bookshelf, whether it was okay for Patton Oswalt to pretend to make a joke, or whether Jennifer Weiner is getting enough book reviews.

But you know what people don't get into an uproar about on the internet? Poor people getting screwed.

Here's a thing that happened yesterday that occasioned,  as near as I can find, no internet outrage, even locally.  The MBTA, Boston's public transit authority, proposed an average 5% fare hike that was approved.  

But they were tricky about that 5% average.  If you live in Needham, a wealthy suburb of Boston, your Zone 2 monthly commuter rail pass is only going up from $189 to $198, for a 4.8% increase, whereas if you take buses and trains within the city of Boston, your monthly pass is going up from 70 to 75 dollars a month,  or a 7.1% increase. 

The MBTA promises that with the extra money, they're going to improve the commuter rail, which serves the suburbs, and the Green Line, which serves primarily the comparitively wealthy residents of Brookline and Newton and the privileged students at private colleges who live in Allston and Brighton.

 Meanwhile, the Red and Orange Lines, which carry most of Boston's working poor, offer service that grows less reliable by the day (with a tight budget, the MBTA has clearly been skimping on maintenance). 

So the people who can least afford to pay for the increase, the people who get hit with massive delays at least once a week, (and the people more likely to be paid on an hourly basis who therefore lose money when the trains are delayed)  are actually paying a higher percentage increase than anybody else.  

This, people, is what you call a social justice issue.  Where are the social justice warriors?

Maybe they think it's not a big deal because it's only 5 bucks a month. Or maybe they think it's not a big deal because it's happening to other people. Or maybe they're inured to the many small and large ways that people with no money get hosed in this country.

Or, most likely, they're not thinking about it at all.

I think of privilege as not having to worry about stuff that other people have to worry about.  If you've got time and interest to spare yelling at someone on the internet because they don't agree with you in the exact right way, or because you're deeply offended by something  some idiot said, and it never even occurs to you to spend any of  your ample supply of outrage on how the working poor are getting to their jobs, well, that my friend, is what privilege is.