Trying to "Get Over"

The sights, the sounds, the smells of the city constantly enliven something new within me. Each day, to poorly paraphrase Emmanuel Levinas, I'm constantly forced to shift my ontology, to allow new things to appear, and each day, new things do appear. That's the most amazing thing. I remember Kyle once told me that after he read Heidegger, he saw the world differently- he saw birds in trees. I didn't think the same would happen to me, nor did I think I would reference Being and Time in so many of my intellectual and highbrow, i.e. all, of conversations. All joking aside, though, this idea about what encroaches upon our care as appearing to us is dead-on.

Moving on, though, today at work I finished the first draft of the project report for the Ford Foundation after which I spent the afternoon reading once more about gender. It's interesting how intricately related all forms of power discrepancies are, be it race, gender, class. The unholy combination of these, though, proves immensely devastating, and unfortunately prevalent still everywhere in the world. As a white heterosexual man, I am incredibly privileged just in my "thrownness" (ha, another Heideggerean term for you). Just by being white, male, and heterosexual, I remain in the the upper caste of society not by merit but rather by birth alone. By chance. Now there's reason for egalitarianism. Chance, a roll of the dice, a flip of a card, an empty chamber in a revolver (for those more daring), that has determined so much about my life. My efforts and attempts, my inability to resign myself to a simple satisfactory life of settling drive me forward, but still I start a few lines forward. The question remains for me, as it always does, how does a white heterosexual man break down the terrible trifecta of racism, patriarchy, and class conflict that are at the fundamental core of modern society?