Just as I happened to miss the entire NFL season again this year, I recently missed the Stacey Abrams Show that followed President Trump’s marvelous State of the Union (SOTU) speech two weeks ago. I was going to watch her cry about how she really had won the Georgia gubernatorial election in November because, after all, she had Obama and Oprah campaigning for her, so she could not possibly have lost. My TV already was tuned to the station. But first I had to sharpen some pencils. Then there were these two soda cans that were empty, so had to be put into our recyclables garbage. It was getting later at night, so I had to adjust the thermostat. I noticed two or three lint pieces on the carpet, so I had to pick them up. I don’t know where the time went.

Interesting, isn’t it, that the Democrat party, with free national television time on all the networks, selected the Ungovernor of Georgia. They have a prominent member of the Cherokee Nation who proudly boasts enough Indian blood to provide one-third of an ant’s nutritional needs for twenty minutes. Another Senator from the Land of Minnesota Nice who abuses her workers, insults and demeans them, throws things at them, consequently has the highest of staff turnovers, and even needed to be counseled privately by Gentleman Harry Reid. Another, Spartacus the Vegan Gladiator of Newark, who published that he would fondle women as he worked his way around the playing field from first base to second base, managing to avoid any short stop. Another, who at age 30ish pranced about publicly up and down the Golden State with a married power broker in his 60s, girlfriend and boyfriend, all while the Sugar Daddy’s wife, Blanche Brown, was telling the news media: “Listen, she may have him at the moment, but come inauguration day and he’s up there on the platform being sworn in, I’ll be the b***h holding the Bible.”

So many wonderful choices — and they chose The Unguv. (For the record, Stacey Abrams also is co-founder of Nourish, Inc.) Unguv Stace was chosen because (i) she is Black, not White; and (ii) she is female, not male. In other words, in the world of Democrat Intersectionality, she was born with two points, and all she needs is someday to convert to Islam, find Navajo, Iroquois, or Asian blood, and to express doubts about her gender identity, and she will be moved from the Pelosi Speakers’ Bureau to head their list of future Supreme Court nominees.

Here is the thing: In our new racially divided intersectionalist society that Obama created, I now feel — more than ever — very, very White… and very, very male. Crazy Mazie Hirono wants men to “shut up”? The #MeToo crowd wants all women’s voices to be believed unquestioningly — except when such trust might take down Michael Avenatti or hand the Virginia governorship to a Republican? Well, my response to Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory and the whole bunch of “Women’s March” Jew-hating, Christian-hating, European-hating, man-hating bigots is this: I am a White male. Deal with it.

Here is what my White Male privilege entails me to enjoy — and eat your hearts out:

1. I get up every morning, and I go to work. I work very hard. If I do my work well, the fruits of my labors result in great personal satisfaction, touch others’ lives, and provide me and those I love with a respectable living. If I fail, I am left without anything because, as part of my White Male privilege, I was socialized never — not under any circumstances — to accept food stamps, welfare, or any government assistance if I otherwise could work for income. In our White Male privileged universe, the women with whom we associate signal that a man on government assistance is not a worthy marriage partner. For White Male privilege to generate female interest, we need not be millionaires — though that never hurts — but we definitely at least must be hard-working, and we get extra points if we project resourcefulness. Privilege.
2. When my former wife and I ran into a financially challenging time early in our marriage — this was many, many moons ago — it emerged that one of the two of us would have to set aside personal career aspirations and dreams, maybe for the next few years, maybe for the rest of a lifetime. And, feminism or no feminism, egalitarianism or no egalitarianism, it emerged that the marital partner with White Male privilege is the one who has to give up everything to bring in more money because, egalitarianism and feminism notwithstanding, “it is the man’s job.” So I left the rabbinate and went to law school. Privilege.
3. Years later, no one gave my kids any extra wink-wink when they applied for college admission. The University of California has no seats set aside for the children of White Male privilege. Neither do the Ivy League schools. Yes, they do set aside some “legacy” spots for the children of the George Bushes and the Kennedys to get in, but those seats come with expectations that major donations will follow. For regular White Male privilege stiffs like me, though, my kids need to score in the upper stratospheres of the admission exams, or they will need to readjust their dreams while others get admitted ahead of them with lower entrance exams, profoundly meager extracurricular records, and weaker math and verbal skills.
4. With White Male privilege, I have to watch and hear my essence insulted every day by one of the two major political parties in this country. I am a really fair and enormously accepting guy, and I never would judge someone by race, by religion, by ethnicity, by gender preference. And yet the privileged White Male never knows when some sociopath may be lurking at the next Clintonian Basketful to point a finger and say “You voted for Trump — You are racist!” Or “You speak perfect English — You are ethnonationalist.” “You quote great works of European literature — You are a First Worlder.” “You believe in the Bible — You are homophobic and not suited to be a judge in an American court.” “You speak of how your grandparents entered this country legally through the port of entry at Ellis Island — You are xenophobic.” “You tell people there is opportunity in America — You are Deplorable.”
5. With White Male privilege, I end up regularly sharing some of my money with others. I cannot get away merely with virtue-signaling by kneeling at the National Anthem and buying Nike sneakers or Gillette female razors — and then wallowing in cash that I do not share. Unlike the NBA and NFL Gazillionaires who get paid millions because they can throw a ball or dribble in public or knock someone down, and who devote their Benjamins to their own narcissistic self-indulgences, it has been socialized into White Males of privilege like me that we give generously to those who need, not leaving it to Government to spread crumbs for the needy with other people’s money.

No, White males are not perfect; flaws are a defining aspect of the human experience. I have my issues with the cheapskates and penny-pinchers of NATO who will not pay their fair share of their defense but expect America to pay out in treasure and in blood. And as a Jew, I also am well aware of some past matters that occurred in Europe. But I look at my East European heritage with deep pride. That European heritage — whether East or West European — is at the source of the great ideas and world-changing values that produced governments dedicated to freedom from tyranny, the Protestant work ethic, the daring to explore new worlds and to take the risks to achieve great things, all of which have brought more prosperity, more comfort, better life, more learning and wisdom than ever could have been imagined. The wealthiest people of yore could not have imagined air conditioning in the summer, automobiles and air travel for vacations and for business. The White males of the West dared advance great theories and breakthroughs in science and medicine. Nobel Prizes list some of the heroes of world civilization, and one large chunk of them came out of North America, Europe, and Asia.

No, the Caucasian male experience has not been exclusively proud. The British and French and Germans seem to have killed each other for centuries, sometimes over religion, sometimes over national foolishness, sometimes (it seems) just to give Shakespeare something to write about. The British did terrible things to the Irish for a century and much, much more. The Spanish and Portuguese imposed the Inquisition — and their repayment is that, within a century or so, they both rapidly descended from their promontories as the world’s two greatest powers to become perpetual side stops on European vacations, all while reduced now to pleading for European Union handouts. Likewise, the barbarians of Rome saw their empire fall. And, yes, Christopher Columbus — G-d bless his memory — and those others occasionally made some very bad decisions that traverse today’s values and standards, but they lived in their times, and the people whom they encountered were not Quakers or Flower Children. Survival was hard. What were the Incas doing before Pizarro showed up in Peru? What was Montezuma doing before Cortez met the Aztecs? Were all the Native American tribes unified in one massive Coca-Cola commercial in Little Big Horn, arms around each other in some kind of hora, singing:

“I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.
I’d like to hold it in my arms and keep it company.
I’d like to build the world a home and furnish it with love.
I’d like Liz Warren for Tribal Chief and Stacey for the Guv.”

No, not really. They were butchering and scalping people, too, doing it to each other. It was a complicated world. But from those Europeans came not only the people who perpetrated the grave historic evil of slavery but also the more-than-300,000 White males who gave their lives courageously and died fighting or from disease while engaged in the Civil War battlefields, all in the name of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to end slavery. It was White males who were compelled to leave their loved ones to go to liberate our allies from tyranny during World War I. Again, White Male privilege saw the honor of being summoned by one’s nation and neighbors to go to Normandy and to Market Garden and to Hürtgen Forest and to Bataan and Midway and Guadalcanal and Saipan and Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Many brave African Americans went, too. Perhaps the bravest and most heroic were America’s Japanese-American fighters who fought for a country that then was rounding up and interning their very families. But that, too, is what it means to be suffused with Male privilege.

Being a male is not only about choosing a lavatory (in places where the choice still is offered). Being a male means accepting certain burdens and responsibilities because the testosterone hormone impacts muscle development and strength, so demands more in certain areas. Being a male means that, when the tragedy of divorce hits, the family court judge almost-always will see two contending divorcing parents, each demanding maximal child custody for themselves and to be paid maximal alimony and child support from the other — and knowing that, almost always, the male will get hit with paying the alimony and the child support while the female will get the extra time with the kids.

Finally, being a White male means thanking G-d every day for a world balanced with females who bear so many of the awesome and enormous responsibilities — beginning with childbirth — that males biologically cannot do. It means understanding the Biblical advisory that it is not good for man to live on his own. We cannot do it without females. We cannot survive without females — not just in the biological and reproductive sense, but in the culture and civilization sense. When an all-male society is created, as during the Gold Rush and Wild West, history records that the society cannot function civilly long-term without women. There is something existential in the need each gender has for the other, and it goes beyond reproducing the species. In today’s world, where we have advanced to see women’s great academic and entrepreneurial heights of attainment, we marvel also at how women successfully defy all challenges to scale those plateaus even as they bear additional burdens that men often do not. And fair-minded women marvel at men who paradoxically do the same, only differently.

In the end, among fair-minded people who live lives rooted in appreciation rather than in venal jealousy, it kind-of all balances out, like three kids in a household. The first-born always will have had the advantage of having been first-born and always will get advantages on any given day when growing up (getting to stay up later, the first allowed to drive), but that first-born also will have had to fight tooth-and-nail for every “privilege.” The youngest always will have had the advantage of being treated as the gentlest cutie-pie while the older two were maturing and starting to get a bit rougher around the edges, but the youngest always will remember having had to go to sleep earlier than the others and just “missing out.” And the middle child always will have had all the advantages of being given instant privileges for which the oldest had to fight — and which still were being denied to the youngest — but also will grow up always beset with having been “in the middle”: denied things that the older one got, while not getting the extra-babying accorded the youngest.

Cruel? Unfair? There is not a darn that anyone can do about the line-up of the three kids born serially into a family. It was a matter of nature: one was born first, one second, and one third. And so it goes with gender, with race, with ethnicity. We are born as we are born. If psychologically healthy, we embrace who we are every day with joy and exuberance, and we celebrate every other person in every other group as part of our same human family. As the President beautifully says: we all bleed the same red, white, and blue.

Or we can sit around like a moping CNN panel discussion, seeing every event in racial terms, jealous of the next one. Intersectionalists and cynical Democrats who feed for personal gain off class jealousy promote that view. That is the way of division, the Politics of Intersectionality, the Curse of Obama that he wreaked on our society when we never had been racially healthier. That is the source of inviting the Unguv to present the counter-SOTU even though — NEWS FLASH! — she lost.

Ultimately, for the fair-minded, White Male privilege in this country is identical to Black and Hispanic and Asian and Native American and Gay and all other such privileges, male and female, here: It is a unique privilege to be an American.