The temptation to just post the entire piece by Weekly Shift is very strong. But, no, you need to read the whole thing over there. You'll have to settle for some excerpts and the framing device below as described in the original piece.
In a memorable scene from the 1998 film Pleasantville (in which two 1998 teen-agers are transported into the black-and-white world of a 1950s TV show), the father of the TV-perfect Parker family returns from work and says the magic words “Honey, I’m home!”, expecting them to conjure up a smiling wife, adorable children, and dinner on the table.
This time, though, it doesn’t work. No wife, no kids, no food. Confused, he repeats the invocation, as if he must have said it wrong. After searching the house, he wanders out into the rain and plaintively questions this strangely malfunctioning Universe: “Where’s my dinner?”
George never demanded a privileged role, he just uncritically accepted the role society assigned him and played it to the best of his ability. And now suddenly that society isn’t working for the people he loves, and they’re blaming him.
It seems so unfair. He doesn’t want anybody to be unhappy. He just wants dinner.
Levels of distress. But even as we accept the reality of George’s privileged-white-male distress, we need to hold on to the understanding that the less privileged citizens of Pleasantville are distressed in an entirely different way. (Margaret Atwood is supposed to have summed up the gender power-differential like this: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”)
George deserves compassion, but his until-recently-ideal housewife Betty Parker (and the other characters assigned subservient roles) deserves justice. George and Betty’s claims are not equivalent, and if we treat them the same way, we do Betty an injustice.
The author cites the carefully parsed argument of Wayne Self's analysis of the Chick-Fil-A obsessions last summer, a series on the distress of the privileged in this post. Between these two writers' insights, we have a really dynamic opportunity to open up the conversations around privilege, justice and scale. As is the norm of coastal California, Encinitas is a bastion of white privilege. But no community is a monolith. There is more diversity than what is most visible in the press and the government and the advertising. What is seldom talked about openly is the fact that changes, like more equitable opportunities, bring distress. Again, read the
whole thing for the whole picture as this is just a glimpse.
