David French on the Privilege of Being an American

First, let’s set the stage. Who are you? Let’s be clear, you are a person of enormous privilege. I bring up that word specifically because you’ll hear it quite a bit at college. In fact, questions of privilege are dominating campuses these days, and the phrase “check your privilege” is a common way of telling certain people — mainly straight, white men (especially southern, straight white men) — to shut up and listen to everyone else. You see, in the college world, no one wants to be privileged. Everyone wants to be oppressed. Everyone wants to be the victim. Why? Because in college the oppressed have all the privileges. So it becomes fashionable to talk about how tough our lives are, how much our families have endured, how much we’ve persevered to get where we are. It’s a self-exalting race to misery — all to show how strong and hard-working we are to overcome the injustice all around us. And most of it is quite false. I’d challenge you to do something different. Don’t race to the bottom. Don’t beat your chest over your own triumphs. Instead, embrace your privilege — but embrace it in a biblical way, a humble way. You can acknowledge your hard work, but you can also acknowledge that — unless you immigrated to this country through your own efforts — you did nothing to earn your citizenship in the United States, the wealthiest, most powerful country in the history of the world. For almost every American, being born here is — to borrow a baseball analogy — like starting life on second base, even when some enjoy more advantages than others. What a privilege. If you’re one of the rare few who immigrated here through your own effort, you still enjoy the privilege of the blood-bought civil liberties and mighty economy that — even when it’s relatively stagnant — can still provide incredible opportunities for the ambitious and hard-working. Did you have to storm the beaches at Normandy? Did you have to hold the line at Gettysburg? Yet you get to enjoy the fruits of those horrifying and terrifying labors. What a privilege.

I’ll never forget when the reality of my own deficiencies hit me between the eyes. I was living in Philadelphia with my wife and (then) two kids — we have three now — and life was good. We had a great penthouse apartment, I had a great job “speaking out” for constitutional liberties like free speech and religious freedom, and — while not by any means wealthy — we certainly had enough money to enjoy life. One evening I was reading the newspaper and came across two stories about the Iraq War. It was 2005, and the war was going badly. Sectarian violence was spinning out of control, and Army recruiting was suffering. It seemed that not many people wanted to join the military and be shipped off to fight a losing war. The first article detailed the Army’s effort to recruit older soldiers. I read it, looked at my wife in disgust, and said something like, “America is just too soft to fight a long war.” I kept reading on to the second story — describing a firefight in an Iraqi town — and read how an officer was wounded (a man about my age) and used a reporter’s satellite phone to literally call home, to tell his wife and two children that he was hurt but that he’d be ok. That’s when my conscience stopped me cold. America wasn’t too soft to fight a long war. I was too soft. And I had no excuse. Think about that wounded officer. Did he love his wife less than I loved my wife? Did he love his kids less than I love my kids? Yet he was risking everything, and I was risking nothing. So I enlisted. I became a JAG officer in the United States Army and deployed to Iraq as part of the Surge in 2007 — attached to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment.