the privileges i have

i can party all night and sleep all afternoon, because someone else on a farm far away gets up early to feed animals and water plants. i can avoid the traffic and buy groceries at 11pm, because somebody will be staffing the shop. i can avoid a restaurant if i don't like the amount of mayonnaise on my salad, and few would think i'm strange or picky. i can procrastinate a deadline then stay at the office til 11pm, because the vietnamese place down the road sources ingredients, tools, gas, electrcity, water, chairs, crockery, and then cooks dinner for me when i walk in the door.

i can tell as much of the truth as i like, without fearing for my life or that of my loved ones.

i can buy champagne for christmas bottled thousands of miles away.

i can freelance from home because others stock my supermarket, upgrade my internet servers, make my clothes, and import goods from overseas. i don't have to spend my days learning to sew to wear a great new dress, or an interview suit, or even shorts for the pub. i don't have to know how to make a toaster to have soldiers with breakfast.

i can see in the new year camped along a riverbank with friends and lovers. i can take time off work. i can choose where i live, who to spend time with, what to read. i can decide whether the material things i want are worth working a five-day week, or whether i want to work part time and spend energy growing veggies. or studying. or contemplating my navel.

i can afford medication.

i can choose to live 8km out of a city centre and buy reasonably priced organic goods on a saturday morning, smiling hello at all the other urban hippies. i can choose to live on a mountaintop with dogs and chickens and fish and views of a city.

i can love anybody and tell the world.

i can protest against internet censorship at a moment's notice because some time after the invention of the printing press, a group of people agreed to have a system for peer-reviewed publication for sharing and enhancing methods of knowledge advancement, which was used for improving protocols for encoding information in ones and zeroes. someones somewhere made machines to decode radio waves transmitted through the air, and yesterday, someone posted about a rally on facebook.

i can ride along the creek because the council keeps the paths neat and signposted, the sewerage engineers keep the water clean, the locals create working bees, the state government contracts the printing of bike path maps, and everybody learns the road rules at school.

all these people, planning, organising, working hard, so i can have these choices.