First published at CounterPunch

I’m currently working from the roof of the Austin Public Library, or at least I was working until I got distracted and started writing this instead. And before you picture me sitting cross-legged in gravel between a fire escape and an HVAC unit, I should clarify that our library has an actual rooftop garden—complete with tables and chairs and native plants, shaded by a solar panel arbor—which I have to assume is not standard for libraries across the country.

From six floors above street level, I watch the traffic move up and down Cesar Chavez, and the runners loop around the Lady Bird Lake hike and bike trail. Twenty or so years after the name change, my brain still wants to call it Town Lake. I suspect Cesar Chavez Street will have a new name soon as well. Dolores Huerta Boulevard has a nice ring to it.

Six floors is an interesting height. It’s high enough to give you some separation, low enough to still see details on the ground. Details like the homeless man with the dirty red backpack sleeping on the park bench in front of a trendy, upscale sushi and cocktail bar where the average diner drops at least a hundred bucks a head. Never been, but I just googled it. I doubt the man on that bench has a hundred dollars to his name, let alone to spend on raw fish and cocktails mixed, no doubt, by a bartender with a waxed mustache who has strong opinions about the provenance of the gin. The man sleeping on the bench has a dog, a small, wiry-haired mutt, sitting at his feet, and I’m guessing it’s the dog that made me focus on this particular human, because he is far from the only person living on the street that I can see right now.

With billionaires governing the country and buying the press, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about wealth disparity, about how wide the gap actually is between folks like Elon Musk and the American middle class. And it’s pretty freakin’ wide. The numbers are so big we can’t really wrap our minds around them. Like trying to visualize the distance between galaxies. Or the number of times Trump has lied in the past month. We’re talking about guys with enough personal wealth to buy nations, or at least feed poor ones. Or maybe even bankroll a presidential election, get handed a government department as a thank you, and spend a few months firing working class federal employees. The word privilege comes to mind, though suddenly it’s not just the oligarchs and tech bros I’m thinking about.

Because from up here, literally looking down on people with almost nothing, on a Monday morning, casually typing away on a MacBook Pro from the rooftop patio of a public library overlooking a beautiful lake, it’s impossible not to recognize my own. My own privilege, that is. Not my own library or lake.

I’m a white man in America. And while I don’t feel bad about that, or think anyone should apologize for who they are or where they were born, it doesn’t mean I can’t recognize the advantages of my birth that I had nothing to do with. Of course being born a white man in America isn’t an automatic free pass to the easy life. The man on the bench down there is also white, and I assume also American. But still.

We weren’t wealthy when I was growing up. Money was tight and my parents worked hard every single day for what we had. I think that’s a big part of why I’ve always worked so hard too, but I’m also smart enough to know that’s not the whole story. I’ve reached a point in my life where I’d call myself comfortable.

The World Bank estimates that nearly half the world’s population lives on less than $6.85 a day, which puts “comfortable” in a different light. I’m not in Musk’s zip code, not even close, but the man with the dirty red backpack on that bench probably can’t imagine my problems, and if he could, he likely wouldn’t even see them as problems. I don’t have to worry about where my next meal is coming from, or whether it’s coming at all. My kids go to a good public school, and I’m not losing sleep over next month’s rent. Getting sick won’t spiral me into crushing debt because I have healthcare through the VA, which is its own complicated kind of privilege, one I earned by signing up to go to war at twenty, but one that nobody should have to earn.

The privilege conversation tends to get flattened into a binary: you either have it or you don’t, you acknowledge it or you’re the villain. But I think maybe it looks a lot more like a ladder with no visible top and no visible bottom, and almost everyone is simultaneously looking up at someone and looking down at someone else. 

Maybe the trick, the thing most of us either subconsciously or actively avoid, is actually looking down.

I’m not trying to justify anything or make myself feel guilty about where I’ve landed, just thinking on paper. Looking at a man and his dog sleeping outside a fancy restaurant that I could afford to eat at reminds me that I’m on this ladder too. 

Hard work got me a few rungs and luck got me some others. Being born when and who and where I was probably handed me a few rungs I didn’t earn at all. By any global measure I’m near the top of that ladder, though that says more about global poverty than it does about my bank account. By the American standard of exponential growth and endless accumulation, I’ve barely climbed off the ground. And honestly, I’m not really interested in climbing any further.

Maybe that says something about my lack of ambition and drive. I’m genuinely not sure. I’m not going for false modesty here—the guy who can’t stop telling you he doesn’t care about money is almost as annoying as the guy who can’t stop telling you how much he has. What I can say is that enough to pay the bills, provide for my family, and still be able to spend a Monday morning casually writing from a rooftop patio feels like plenty of freedom to me. Anything beyond that sounds like it might be more trouble than it’s worth. Though I’m also aware that what I’m calling “enough” is out of reach for a lot of people through no fault of their own.

***

It’s always bugged me that the accepted answer to a man sleeping on a park bench—at least the one you hear most often in this country—is that he could be successful, maybe even a billionaire himself, if he just worked harder and “pulled himself up by his bootstraps.” I’m sitting here six floors above him, high enough up to feel removed from his life, but not so high that I can’t see he doesn’t even have any boots. And somewhere above both of us—so far above us it’s almost abstract—there are people with enough personal wealth to end hunger, fund universal healthcare, and still have enough cash left over to buy a new private jet every week.

In the wealthiest country in the history of the world, working class people are literally dying because they can’t afford insulin, and families are bankrupted by medical bills for illnesses they had no way to prevent. Kids go to school hungry while their parents stretch minimum wage paychecks just to keep the lights on.  And the guys at the top of the ladder who depend on that labor are focused on getting even higher. I don’t know what you would call that, but I don’t think the word is success.

Nick Allison is a writer and editor based in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in Slate, HuffPost, The Fulcrum, and elsewhere. Follow him on Bluesky @nickallison80.bsky.social