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04/23/2004:

"Reflections on the Brain-Rotting Properties of Privilege"

To truly understand a nation, a culture, or its people, it helps to know what they take for granted.

After all, sometimes the things that go unspoken are more powerful than the spoken word, if for no other reason than the tendency of unspoken assumptions to reinforce core ways of thinking, feeling and acting, without ever having to be verbalized (and thus subjected to challenge) at all.

What's more, when people take certain things for granted, anything that goes against the grain of what they perceive as "normal" will tend to stand out like a sore thumb, and invite a hostility that seems reasonable, at least to those dispensing it, precisely because their unspoken assumptions have gone uninterrogated for so long.
www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-04/20wise.cfm