The Privilege of Naivety

 The film Into The Wild is the story of Christopher McCandless. He chucks it all away, literally, and goes to live in the wilds, the bush, all by his self. He starves and dies, September 6 1992. 

They make a movie about him and he is famous. Eddie Vedder does the soundtrack and nails it with the song Hard Sun. There are those who praise his stand against conformity and society, while others think he was a stupid young man. For me I really didn't think much of it. There are so many things to think about rather than one random guy going to live in the bush and dying. Still there was a comment I came across on social media, where this Indigenous Woman said it was a white privilege thing. I know I am quite quick to white bash with the best of them, but I had to really thing about this one. I mean you have to agree white folk are nuttier than 'Grandma aged Cher wearing black dress tong while grinding her blonde haired son', but in this case I didn't jump right in on the white devil thing.  Still I sat on a dead log and tapped on my head; think think think; "I am rumbly in my tumbly, time for something sweet, I am short fat and proud of that..."

There is a reality television show called Alone; people are put into the bush and expected to survive for a number of days. The 7th season has people living in the north for 100 days hoping to win a million bucks. The participants can take 10 things with them. It shows even with supplies, the life is difficult and it is difficult to last the 100 days. When they first start off, they are just full of piss and vinegar, bragging about how good they are with a bow and arrow, making a fire and all sort of bush skills. The Show shows us how naive and fragile people are. It is not easy to be naive.  Even with their survival kits the bush goers end calling for the show to get them "the hell out of this death trap." So it is no surprise some green (green is a metaphor for inexperienced person and not actually the Hulk) young man starved himself to death in a bush bus. 

I think there is a privilege to thinking you can do what you want at anytime. It may or may not be a white thing, but if history has thought us anything, White people really think they are the centre of the universe and can do what they want. I mean come on, thinking it is only you and you alone is a privilege if not just naive. Did this young guy think about what he was doing? Did he realize he can't just order the Wild to bend to his will? We are not a universe of self. Thinking and acting this way is wrong, it's selfish. The consequences of his actions are not in isolation. He might have had family, had friends affective by his actions. The people who found him and how they reconcile with finding a rotting corpse out in the wilds in an abandoned bus. Yes privilege has its privileges. You can encroach on out people's land, lives without consideration of others. 

I am not sure if we can say his actions are because of White privilege, but we can lean that way a little for sure. We are seeing White people doing this kind of privileged shit all over the world: sailing the seas alone-ending up costing lot of cash while they have to be rescued, doing a walk to the North Pole, flying to space and jumping out of the space ship, swimming sea channels just to get to the other side, pretending to be Black or Indigenous while they promote bigotry of White people and of course the calling the cops on anyone else who are just being not white.  So it seems White folk are only considerate of themselves with no thought of anyone or anything else. You have to wonder why? There could be countless reasons, but I do think lot of it has to do with privilege, just plain privilege. Now that we have the internet we can find just about any kind of crazy lunatic privileged stuff people are doing. 

“Anybody can be an explorer if they want to be. You can be an astronaut if you want. Figure out what you want to do, and then go do it.”

Helen Thayer

Helen Thayer walks up to the North Pole with her dog Charlie in 1998 because she was good like that.  Other people are just trying to live rather than expecting to walk into the bush because they can be anything they want to be.