Privilege

Privilege. Privilege may be defined as a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.

I am a white guy. I do believe that my skin color has granted me some advantage. I do not think that being white necessarily grants privilege. I see the classism in America & I see plenty of white folks that I do not consider to be privileged.

& while I do consider myself somewhat advantaged, I understand the difference between a little advantage & and being able to live as a truly free human being ought to be able to live. Considering that, I wonder if privilege is perhaps one of those words that has lost it's meaning.

Most of the advantage that I believe I have comes from where I was born & where I still live. Jackson County Indiana is a mostly white community. Especially Brownstown Indiana, where growing up, I cannot recall one black kid in school with us. While we had some cops there who harassed us, for the most part, they had to be careful who they harassed. Poor kids were better targets.

Understand, I have had my run-ins with the police. I have been arrested probably twenty times or more. I have spent collectively around two years in the county jail. Most of this was due to alcohol, though occasionally due to attitude. I have never been beat up by the police & obviously I have never been shot. In today's society, I consider that a blessing.

I volunteered for the Army on my seventeenth birthday. My grandfather & my uncle had both served in the Army & I was raised to believe that the US was the good guys & we were protecting freedom at home and around the world. I graduated from high school midterm & went into the army in February of 87.

Before I even got to basic training, the army decided I was in the wrong MOS & assigned me where they wanted me. They put me into field artillery. By the end of basic & AIT I had been assigned to a special weapons program where I was trained to assemble nuclear rounds for howitzers. Even at seventeen, the insanity of such a thing was obvious.

The army then shipped me off to Schofield Barracks Hawaii. They promptly lost me in the shuffle & instead of assigning me to the special weapons unit, I was assigned to 2/11 field artillery, a 102 unit. The army's mistake undoubtedly had a huge impact on my life.

The 2/11 was filled with malcontents. Nearly all of my fellow soldiers were pro-FTA, or "Fuck The Army". Drinking was the pastime. I was eighteen & coming from Jackson County Indiana, already a prolific beer drinker. I fit right in. We did our army work, then we partied. Every night.

While in Hawaii I was deployed twice. We went to Thailand and we went to Korea. Being a 102 unit, we did a lot of air mobile maneuvers. Flying in helicopters all over the island, all over Thailand, all over Korea, along with the party time we enjoyed, is another reason I feel advantaged.

Thailand & Korea showed me something. They showed me inequality. I learned that the US dollar was all powerful around the world. I learned that people in other nations would do just about anything for a few USDs. I dined with people living in huts existing mostly on rice. I enjoyed some fried grasshoppers.

I began to understand we were not the good guys. The FTA attitude affected me greatly. I became anti-authority quickly. Being eighteen, I was frequently in trouble for drinking. Sure, you can sign up to give your life for your nation but you can't drink alcohol. I began to rebel. Then I met another Mike & things got interesting.

Mike introduced me to Hawaiian cannabis. The first time I got stoned in Hawaii I thought I was dying. I had never gotten a body buzz from any herb in Indiana. This was the most intense body buzz I have ever felt from pot. I became a cannabis user. I became more & more FTA.

My group of friends continued to party hard. Finally the day came down when a piss test was upon us. This became my way out. Tired of the bullshit I went & turned myself in. The army wanted me to quit drinking. In an environment where all of my buddies drank, every single day, this was not going to happen.

Finally, after yet another drinking incident, my captain pulled me into his office & said, "Cox, what the fuck are you doing here? Why are you in field artillery? This is clearly not the MOS for you. Would you like to go home?" The army was giving a lot of early outs in those days. Particularly from Hawaii. So I took mine.

After being in the army & seeing the world & the reality of things, I became very critical of the US government. I campaigned against Bush Sr & Bill Clinton in the first election in which I was eligible to vote. That's right. I voted for Perot. Being nineteen & figuring that anything outside the Democratic & Republican party would have to be an improvement.

I continued to party hard. I loved to drink. I was drunk or stoned a good portion of the time. For the most part I stayed out of trouble. I managed to talk my way out of trouble with cops on several occasions. I really started clashing with them after I moved to Seymour Indiana at twenty three.

After six years in Seymour, several run ins with Seymour police, being threatened, having my wife arrested in the early morning hours over a 300 dollar hospital bill that turned out to be already paid & losing most of my faith in anything decent ever happening in Indiana, I bailed & moved to Ft Lauderdale Florida.

In Ft Lauderdale, in August of 00, I got on the internet. It was there that my disdain for government was solidified. I discovered just how inhumane the war on drugs is. I discovered just how evil cannabis prohibition is. & I discovered just how corrupt the US government had become.

This was in the middle of the 00 election & I rapidly got sucked into the mayhem. Bush v Gore became a solid reminder of why I had preached against Bill Clinton. The policies of the DNC over the past eight years had not done anything for anyone that I knew. If anything, Clinton & the DNC had further degraded civil rights. I became a Nader supporter.

Supporting Ralph Nader in South Florida made me an instant enemy of democrats. The republicans hated me because I never missed an opportunity to point out the evils of the GOP & the Bushes. I spent hundreds of hours online railing against the evils of both parties & American government in general.

Then election day came. I went and voted at the nice library in my nice neighborhood where I had registered. My roommate came home & informed me that he was not allowed to vote as he was not registered. He had registered to vote at the BMV that was just across the tracks in the rougher neighborhood. That was my first exposure to the coup that was under way.

As I sat & watched the election unfold that night, Florida was called for Gore. This was based on exit polls, that had never failed to predict the winner. The news went to some room somewhere where George W Bush was chilling & watching the results. He was laughing. He says, "I don't think Florida is decided yet." I thought, this crazy bastard is delusional.

Then Fox news announced that Florida was not decided yet & might have actually gone to Bush. The whole thing descended into chaos. The republicans revolted. The democrats folded & in the end, coup successful, Bush was given the white house. He was a profit.

The voter disenfranchisement & obvious instances of cheating were rampant & were well exposed by Michael Ruppert and others. I witnessed one of the ways that likely Gore voters were disenfranchised under my own roof. Thousands of voters were kept from voting. A pall of hatred fell over the area. I narrowly avoided a few bar fights thanks to my roommate being a very large fellow.

The 00 election forever pitted me against the US government. I returned to Jackson County April 1st of 01, deliberately on April Fools day. I was spouting anti-drug war, anti-cannabis prohibition & anti-Bush information both verbally and through any form of writing I could. It was not popular.

On Sept 13, 01 I was arrested for trespassing at a friend's house. I was allowed to be there but my friend wasn't there to say so. The cops came in as if the people who had dropped the twin towers were in the garage. Guns leveled at my head, barking orders, unimpressed I proceeded to, in their view, disrespect their authoritah. It was the beginning of a fifteen year (& counting) stand against tyranny.

By the summer of 02 our local government had labeled me "highly anti-government & easily agitated". While I knew it was a target on my back, I considered it an honor. I took the view that anyone who was not anti-government at that point was not paying any attention. In my view the 00 election was a coup & the US no longer had a legitimate government.

Since that point I have progressively become more Anarchic. I have yet to find that instance where government has been successful. I see that most of our lives are lived in Anarchy. Most every decision we make is voluntary. Most people do not stop to consider, well, this is legal or that is illegal, we just do as we please. For the most part, people do not go out of their way to harm one another.

The US government on the other hand has gone out of it's way to harm not only US citizens but humanity as a whole. I tend to view evil as the ultimate foolishness. The foolishness that has taken over the US government is as extreme as it gets. Human rights are trampled. The constitution ignored. Police militarized. War glorified.

I do not believe that we can go on in this direction much longer. That is, I believe that continuing in this direction much longer will result in a third world war. The second world war ended with the needless dropping of two nuclear devices on civilian populations. There is no reasonable doubt against the widespread use of nuclear weapons in the third world war if it is allowed to unfold.

Hillary Clinton has proven that she is not afraid of war. Indeed it appears that she rather enjoys making war. She has learned nothing from the devastation of Iraq, Libya & Syria. She has learned nothing from creating vacuums of power that have led to the rise of Islamic extremists in those nations. She seems to want to bring about a collapse of the Middle East into all out war.

Donald Trump is a pompous, loud mouthed, bullying rich boy of a man. There are many reasons not to like him. He is not a person that I would want representing me or the nation I live in by any means.

The Libertarian Johnson seems to think that TPP is ok, despite saying that it is full of crony capitalism. I have seen the disaster that NAFTA has caused, including the collapse of Mexico into a near narco state. TPP is not ok with me & is most likely a deal breaker.

Stein I do not know but imagine to be mostly a socialist & I have yet to see a socialist government that did not lead to disaster.

Voting for any of these people does not inspire me. Voting does not inspire me. As much as I feel that I have been somewhat advantaged growing up in America, I know that most Americans are not privileged. Very few get to enjoy their true freedoms as a humans. No amount of voting is going to change this.

For all of the advantages that I feel I have enjoyed, I know that I have been oppressed at the same time. I know that we are all being oppressed. In that, for all of the advantages that we may have over another in this nation and certainly over others in other nations, we are really not privileged at all.

Privilege is imaginary for the vast majority of us. We are closer to slaves than free human beings. Two hundred forty years or so of an allegedly democratically elected republican government has not bode well for Americans nor humanity as a whole.

A nation that is supposed to be a force for good is instead increasingly being used as a force to bring about horrific destruction.

American privilege is looking a lot like prison. If it continues in this direction, it'll be a death sentence.

It's not a privilege to be able to write about oppression. It's a natural born freedom. If more of us would use it maybe more of us would realize it.

Best of,
Peace