"It is a unique privilege to be an American."

In The American Spectator, Dov Fischer writes about privilege - the privilege of being an American.

Were all the Native American tribes unified in one massive Coca-Cola commercial in Little Big Horn, arms around each other in some kind of hora, singing:

“I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.
I’d like to hold it in my arms and keep it company.
I’d like to build the world a home and furnish it with love.
I’d like Liz Warren for Tribal Chief and Stacey for the Guv.”

No, not really. They were butchering and scalping people, too, doing it to each other. It was a complicated world. But from those Europeans came not only the people who perpetrated the grave historic evil of slavery but also the more-than-300,000 White males who gave their lives courageously and died fighting or from disease while engaged in the Civil War battlefields, all in the name of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to end slavery. It was White males who were compelled to leave their loved ones to go to liberate our allies from tyranny during World War I. Again, White Male privilege saw the honor of being summoned by one’s nation and neighbors to go to Normandy and to Market Garden and to Hürtgen Forest and to Bataan and Midway and Guadalcanal and Saipan and Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Many brave African Americans went, too. Perhaps the bravest and most heroic were America’s Japanese-American fighters who fought for a country that then was rounding up and interning their very families. But that, too, is what it means to be suffused with Male privilege.

Being a male is not only about choosing a lavatory (in places where the choice still is offered). Being a male means accepting certain burdens and responsibilities because the testosterone hormone impacts muscle development and strength, so demands more in certain areas. Being a male means that, when the tragedy of divorce hits, the family court judge almost-always will see two contending divorcing parents, each demanding maximal child custody for themselves and to be paid maximal alimony and child support from the other — and knowing that, almost always, the male will get hit with paying the alimony and the child support while the female will get the extra time with the kids.

Finally, being a White male means thanking G-d every day for a world balanced with females who bear so many of the awesome and enormous responsibilities — beginning with childbirth — that males biologically cannot do. It means understanding the Biblical advisory that it is not good for man to live on his own. We cannot do it without females. We cannot survive without females — not just in the biological and reproductive sense, but in the culture and civilization sense. When an all-male society is created, as during the Gold Rush and Wild West, history records that the society cannot function civilly long-term without women. There is something existential in the need each gender has for the other, and it goes beyond reproducing the species. In today’s world, where we have advanced to see women’s great academic and entrepreneurial heights of attainment, we marvel also at how women successfully defy all challenges to scale those plateaus even as they bear additional burdens that men often do not. And fair-minded women marvel at men who paradoxically do the same, only differently.

Read more here.