A big pervasive unthought set of privileges for better or worse is the fact we all live in a ginormous empire, and that has its privileges, many times characterized by other not so big nations or empires as that place with the most guns. Not exclusively great for all the empire’rees (that would be us) but does give us all an edge in the resource allocation game, from colonial times to corporate colonialism, whether bad, good or in between it’s a thing. (back in the day: Golly why are these Japanese transistor radios so cheap?)

That’s just one (big) potentially exploitable privilege, depending on anyone's definition. I mean, I don’t think Lithuania has spawned a lot of banana republics unless I missed my European history classes.

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Storytime: really? Yep. Back in the day, I did a 4-year stint at an ironworks and steel fabrication shop in a government/university city where of course us laborers could learn a lot, yes we did. But though many that worked there back in the day might try to glamorize the trade, with the many cliched tropes like ‘ workin’ man ‘, ‘ Miller time ‘ and all that bull crap. (it can and did get thick) Though we might not think so, we were exposed to the privilege of work, work as in at least more than half our jobs were government contracts in one form or another, if there were only private jobs, I probably never would have been hired to begin with, I was destined to suffer from the privilege of favorable geography. We all knew what government jobs were but I doubt many of us were cognizant what advantage this fact afforded.

So anyone's work memories probably have some degree of skip over or selective memory syndrome. That is we end up hearing the more rosy colored version of personal yesteryears. We’ all don’t need to hear all those unseemly details, doesn’t make a great narrative.

When exposed to rattling off of some personal greatness, all that real bootstrap stuff, there is a big chance the other half of a story could be all the myriad crutches provided by other life contributors. Yeah but that doesn’t fit the storyline, so Naaaaaaa.

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Confessions: Thank anyone who has helped us use Wikipedia(s), Google, the Intertubes, etc. to have the frickin world at our fingertips. Oh, I guess that would include teachers. :-)