What it takes to be special...

I am walking through the sky-way system in downtown St Paul today, when I run across these large window covers with different stories on them.  I notice that each story has flag-like marker that signifies a particular language or origin of each of these stories.

So I am curious to see what exactly these are and who the city appears to be honoring, and I start to read. After reading two or three I begin to realize that there isn't anything incredibly remarkable about any of the people or anything remarkable about the stories. This person is going to school. This person works as a waiter. This person got married and is raising children. The only thing in common is that none of them were born in the United States.

So it dawns on me. The city has decided to honor fairly normal people for the sole reason that they are immigrants. The student might have a 4.0 GPA, or might be flunking out this quarter. The waiter might be employee of the month, or he may have been fired since this story. The home maker might be the greatest mother in the world, or could be beating her children. We don't know.

But we are being asked to celebrate their very existence as if there is something special about being born somewhere else. Which, btw, implies that being born in the United States is not worthy of any celebration or honor.

Sometimes you get tired of it.

My grandparents on my dad's side immigrated here as children. My grandfather served his country during a world war, and lived a very modest and very low income life as a worker in a shoe factory. My dad obviously grew up dirt poor, served his country in Vietnam, worked his way through night school, and spent 30 years a public servant for the State.  For the first several years of my life, my parents struggled to make ends meet, and we lived what some might call a "white trash" existence in a part of town where there were no sidewalks, or paved roads, or anything resembling a park for kids to play in (probably because nobody with kids really wanted to live there).

When I graduated from high school, I worked two jobs, resided in a trailer park, lived on things like egg noodle dinner in order to pay my own way through college (with a very limited academic scholarship my first year, and otherwise little outside help).  When I graduated from college, I moved to five different towns chasing my career, before settling up in the "Twin Cities".

Yeah, I do pretty well these days. I have been at the same job since 1999,  I make good money, my kids want for little, and I have a beautiful young wife whom I am looking forward to growing old with. But as far as most people are concerned I am where I am at for one reason and one reason only. White privilege.

But I guess that privilege doesn't include honoring my life story on a window cover in a sky-way. In 2017, you have to be born somewhere else or have skin that isn't white to be considered special. To add a little icing on that cake, having the audacity to point this out... obviously makes me a racist