People get very responsive when they hear someone speaking about Privilege. They think that the word “privilege” means that there is an implication that the life of the privileged person was not hard—but that is not the case at all. As a former foster child, I want to share with you how many people have experienced privilege that I will never know. When I was a little girl, my siblings and I experienced high levels of neglect and abuse. My baby sister was hospitalized a couple of times due to malnutrition, I experienced physical abuse at the hands of my older brother (and at one point when I was seven was cornered and strangled by him), and my other sister—who was only three years older than me—had to grow up far too fast and be “mom” to my younger sister and me… because our biological mom was mentally absent. My younger sister, although she does not remember most of what we experienced with our biological mother, experienced lasting effects from her lack of care. For years follo
This week, my social media pages have been bombarded with posts about something called the "Cancel Culture"--or a cultural movement of removing anything and everything that said cancel culture finds offensive. I, personally, am exhausted by all of these posts and declarations of "freedom of speech"--not because I do not agree with that sentiment. I definitely believe that, as our constitution has already declared, we do have the freedom to express ourselves in ways that may or may not be offensive to another person (after all, we cannot make everyone happy and even a heart-felt encouraging sentiment can be viewed as offensive to some people). But what exhausts me is the refusal to recognize or even consider the possibility that there is something deeper at work. Consider for a moment the possibility that this desire to cancel offensive things is actually the symptom of a larger illness--one that society refuses to treat or even acknowledge as a real problem. Let u