I have a liberal arts degree from a school in New York. I have spent my adult life in liberal cities. I have conservative parents. I was raised in a conservative household in a conservative town that sometimes dresses up as liberal. I once registered to vote as a Republican, but I no longer believe myself to be Republican. And yet, I’m not sure how I feel about the Democrats.

I have liberal beliefs and I defend them. I defend them heartily because I know the weight of them, I know the importance of them. I know first-hand what happens when they are taken away. I have conservative beliefs that I had once forgone within the fantasy of the liberal arts. It is quite easy to believe in an ideal until you try to enact it.

The good and bad.

The right and wrong.

The black and white.

It is easy to ignore the gray of the real world when you’re the white. Ironically (or not so), this is a concept so deeply ingrained in the culture, it is within the subconscious. We pick a side, forego all conversations, deem the other side irredeemable, and solutions become distant fantasies.

But really, the white is meant to quantify all privilege. Every one of us. We all have privileges that we don’t recognize. We avoid the things that could make us aware of our privilege. It becomes very hard to complain about a long day in the office when you know about the factory conditions of the minor immigrant children working full-time in dangerous, illegal conditions while simultaneously going to school in an attempt to build something for their family. It becomes very hard to complain about the meal at a nice restaurant not being up to the standard it should when you know a single mother unable to put food on the table because of her bills. I could no longer complain about the intensity of working in a cafe when I walked home past a homeless man who hasn’t eaten in days and thought of how the restaurant industry doesn’t bat an eye at its incessant food waste.

We don’t want to see that. We don’t want to know about that. It is too horrible, too heartbreaking. The world is a vicious place.

We focus, instead, on what is making life harder for ourselves. What in my life is keeping me from reaching my ultimate goal, from where I’m supposed to be? It seems to me to be an exceptional perversion of a counterculture that has been desperate to be heard in a country that is desperate to shut them up. The men burnt draft cards and the women burnt bras. Flower power meant the recognition that the ideology they fought for was bigger than any one persons desire for attention. With the end of these movements came the end of a cohesive spirit.

I have spent so long listening to so many people who I were so sure were smarter than me. They speak of authors I’ve never heard of and discuss philosophy with a vocabulary I simply don’t possess. So yeah, I thought I should listen to them. They know what they’re talking about, right?

It is a dirty secret, a dirty lie. And it should make them feel quite shameful.

I am now grown. I’ve read many of the same books. I’ve learned much of the specific vocabulary to take part in the same conversations. I am making myself someone of authority. And what do I now hear constantly? From people at my level? From people with more than me?

Not just that they don’t know what they’re talking about; the humility would be respectable. I am told repeatedly by these people that they’re talking out of their asses. They have nothing to say, they’ve just been given the proper script. It is not brave to comment on social issues within the classroom that is solely filled with people of the exact same caliber.

If you find you’ve been given a seat at the table and you have nothing to say, get up. There is someone else who does, someone who has never been given the chance because the majority is too infatuated with hearing themselves speak.