Check Our Privilege

One "problem" of "checking your privilege"
is that
I think we do not go far enough with this metaphor.

It is not only the relative forms of privilege that I must check; my maleness, my educational privileges, my class privilege, my linguistic privilege, my able-bodiedness, my neurotypicality, and so on...

I take this one step further:

For me, a human birth is a privileged birth.

I check that, remind myself of that, the responsibilities that come with my humanity. The ability to experience both pleasure and pain, to notice how I chase the former and have avoidance toward the latter; that both the chase and the avoidance are signals of the profound unsatisfactoriness of the mundane everyday, in which there is little support for pause, reflection, contemplation, and sincere practice. To be human, to have cognitive and collective capacity to recognise that our political and economic systems reflect a reliance on gross injustice in order to perpetuate cycles of greed, hatred and addictive delusions.

Yes.

To all my friends, regardless of political persuasion, let's check our privilege of being human on a planet over which we have amassed and exerted too much abusive power and influence.

There are responsibilities and humilities that we must practice as a result of a full awareness of our privileged humanity, playing a necessary step in the fate of our beautiful planet.