on getting off easy
There are a lot of ways in which I, individually, am going to avoid being affected by the upcoming fascist shift in American leadership. I'm white, able-bodied, cis, and yeah, maybe a little fruity, but I'm on the straight side of bi. My family's hardly rolling in it, but they've got a mortgage, and even though their money might be a bit tight right now, they still have enough to help me and my siblings out, should the need arise. And even though they're conservative, they still love their gay kids, and treat them well. All things considered, even though it's gonna suck, it won't suck as bad for me as for other people.
But none of this makes me feel any better about the next four years. There's a certain kind of privilege discourse that says, "check your privilege" with a sort of strange, backhanded tone of, "be grateful, the system was set up to benefit you." I never asked for any of these benefits. Making the world worse for people different from me doesn't make my life any better. The default of respect and decency I get by kind of resembling the ghoulish bastards in power is the same default that should be extended to everybody.
I've got trans friends in red states that I don't want to lose access to their healthcare. Hell, my roommates are a polycule that's 2/3rds trans people with disabilities. My sister is starting a family with her wife. Most of the guys I made friends with in the fighting game team back in college were black. Hell, my college used to have a ton of international students from India, before the first Trump administration ruined immigration law.
My so-called "privilege" -- and I resent the term, because again, what I get because of my status is what everyone should get, not some special treat -- doesn't protect the people I care about from the consequences of oppression, neither does it protect me from the consequences of seeing my loved ones being oppressed. The only way to benefit from this system is to shut yourself off from anyone who doesn't look, think, and act like you. To be an island, surrounded by other islands, plugging your ears to the suffering of the masses. And that sounds like a miserable existence, in and of itself.