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The Presumptuousness of “You’ll Be Fine”
How much do you really know about my life… or anybody else’s?
In the earliest weeks of the Trump presidency, actress Lena Dunham appeared on a February 2017 episode of The View. While alluding to her American citizenship and white privilege and class privilege, Dunham expressed she was more worried about how immigrants and transgender people would fare under the Trump/Pence administration than she was worried about her own well-being. To punctuate her point, she then uttered something that I found to be rather triggering…
“The fact is, I’ll be fine,” Dunham said, alluding to how she didn’t view herself as being in physical danger or at risk of destitution in the short term.
More than four years later — with Trump now out of office — I find myself asking: why exactly did her words trigger me so badly?
And I realized… it’s because such rhetoric isn’t unique to Lena Dunham. Legions of privileged people spit out this flavor of rhetoric, continuously, year-in and year-out. They say it to other people who usually share similar attributes of privilege as theirs, ostensibly as a way to convey to them the message of Count your blessings!
But should we be so “unselfish” in our thinking? While every person possesses some combination of…
