I discovered something about myself: I feel uncomfortable around rich people.
I’m sitting there at thanksgiving dinner ready to eat a delicious four-course feast and I can’t begin eating because I have no idea which fork to use. I glance nervously around the table trying to see what everyone else is doing, but the table we are at is enormous, making everyone far away from me… too far to accurately decipher which fork they were using, because to me they all looked pretty much the same. I pick up the one on the outside, because I remember that someone told me once to work from the outside in… or maybe it was inside out. I panic a little. At this point I know that I can feel myself sweating, and the meal hasn’t even started. I feel like a mutt among purebreds as I tentatively use this fork to eat my salad. Nobody is talking. That’s the other thing. My family is so loud and casual that this culture of silent “family bonding” is completely foreign to me, causing me to sweat even more. The somber silence in the room is closing in around me, judging me, and for some reason it is making me feel like I should be eating extra slow, not sure why. So slowly, I raise my fork to my mouth, over and over again, focusing all my energy into not spilling anything, which is difficult for me. Somehow I managed to get through the salad without making a mess.
Apparently it is in between meals that the conversation happens. But even as the talking begins, it is slow, organized, and tentative. I feel like I’m having a discussion in class, to the point where I actually wonder if I should raise my hand to speak. I choose to sit there and listen, observe… perhaps I will figure out how to communicate with this alien species I know as “the rich”. All seems to be going well with my passive approach until the topic of politics comes up. And I don’t mean republican vs. democrat, McCain vs. Obama politics… I mean general civil rights issues… which are so much worse. It starts off with the healthcare topic, and as a NOT RICH cancer patient, I am very passionate about this topic. The father says something along the lines of I don’t think that healthcare is a right, these people shouldn’t be whining about their “rights” when there are hardworking Americans out there who are supposed to pay for it… if you can’t afford healthcare, that’s life… Already I feel my stomach start to churn and that salad wants to come back out, along with all the words I want to say, as the whole family nods in silent, thoughtless agreement… I want to tell them all how stupid and selfish they are to think such a thing, how they are the ones who don’t deserve to be healthy, how people like them are the reason I can’t have an operation to get rid of this thing inside me, how… how even if I don’t know what fork to use for my salad and even though my parents weren’t rich, I’m still just as good a person as them, I still deserve to be healthy and alive, I want to tell them how I always give money to charities, and they, with all the money, probably don’t … And then with a deep breath I clear my head and think about what a horrible person I am being… sitting at their table, enjoying their hospitality, and thinking these horrible thoughts about them at the same time.
Courses two and three go by without too much of a problem, although I do almost soak the entire table with white wine at one point as I try to pass the butter dish apparently the wrong way, and upon realizing this, jerk my arm back nervously, hitting the wine glass. After course three though, the grandfather begins talking about gay rights, and this is when not only my stomach churns, but my head starts spinning as well. I don’t think they should be able to get married like “normal” people… and then the brother: well yeah people think that its going to ruin the sacrament of marriage… back to the grandfather again: no it’s not that, it’s that they don’t just want to get married, they want all the rights of marriage… they can’t think they could get the same rights as normal people… (By the way, I’m not kidding, this is exactly how it was said.) These final words spark another endless string of more and more intense thoughts… NORMAL people? How stupid they are if they think that the ten percent of the population that is gay is not normal… how can anyone say such a horrible thing… don’t you realize you sound no different from a white supremacist or a sexist? Wouldn’t your reaction be priceless if I told you right now that I am the proud daughter of a gay father, and that I have even marched in pride parades! I hope that one of your children is gay… THEN WHAT? I hope YOU ARE! Then you’ll see how hard it is… how ignorant and stupid you have been… Then the brother goes: yeah, if they can have rights, men could just marry each other like that movie “Chuck and Larry”and it wouldn’t even be like real marriage… And that’s when it comes… not as violent as the thoughts inside my head, but it burst out… “So could straight people! They do it all the time to get people into the country! And who cares? It’s not affecting you! Why do you all care so much if other people have the same rights as you?! Besides, all marriage between men and women can’t be considered real when the divorce rate is at fifty percent! Why do you care?! That is so selfish!”
…I’m not kidding. I’m really a moron and I really said that and it was really rude. The rest of the meal was carried out in silence, with a little small talk interjected here and there, and I left soon after it was finished, thanking them profusely and apologizing for my outburst.
The thing is, I’ve been around a lot of people with differing opinions than me and been fine. Many of my friends oppose me politically and I have no problem with it. I’ve been offended before and was able to keep my mouth shut. But maybe this was different because they were rich… I know it sounds ridiculous… and it is…but I think I have some horrible prejudice against rich people. I have this romantic notion like they are the Bishops of Herefords, and we are all Robin Hoods, and I victimize myself in that way, leading to a general dislike for the wealthy. Yes, I do believe that political views are determined by individual experience, by each individual’s own “reality” of life, and I also do believe that in many ways, privilege leads to ignorance, as the privileged have no way of understanding the magnitude of the hardships they will never have to face. However, maybe I’m too hard on people… prejudice is, after all, just the result of lack of understanding… when something is foreign to us, we develop a fear of it, which is a prejudice. I am afraid of rich people. I don’t understand them. I don’t understand their lifestyle. If I had been sitting at a table full of working class people, perhaps I wouldn’t have had such an outburst – in fact – maybe we would have just had an interesting discussion about it because I wouldn’t be so afraid to speak. To me, they would be real people, good people… because my prejudice is that rich people are selfish … (and don’t get me wrong, I think that privileged politics are selfish, that’s not a prejudice)… but I’m not being fair. I’m prejudiced against the rich, the same way the rich are prejudiced against the poor. This is something I need to work on, and I hope it doesn’t make me a horrible person.
