RE: Be a Budget Traveler, Not a Cheapskate
Haggling does take some skill and the approach to it is all important. Westerners are used to fixed prices where you grab something off a shelf and take it to the checkout counter. Haggling is like trading SBDs for Steem in the coin market. You don't pay the ask price but you place a bid somewhere below it.
Street hagglers (unless they are children selling Chicklets) always ask more than what they are willing to accept, double in some cases. For me, haggling is part of the cultural immersion I seek when I travel. I have no desire to spend a couple grand to stay at the Marriot, eat in the Marriot restaurant, swim in the Marriot pool or lie on the beach in front of the hotel. I'd rather stay home.
Certainly if one approachs merchants with anger and accuse them of "ripping you off" then one is presenting an ugly face that becomes how locals view tourists. Those few bad apples spoil it for the rest of us and why I almost always avoid tourist magnets and go where tourists seldom go where the locals are far more friendly.
I am no fan of Western culture, but I urge you to examine the "white privilege" meme and recognize it for what it is, a racist brainworm inserted into your skull to foster racial tension, a divide and conquer technique to keep the masses fighting amongst themselves instead of rising up against their oppressors.
I've met plenty of ugly Japanese, East Indian, Arab and even Mexican tourists, on my travels. What you are really referring to is "wealth privilege." People who have money think they are better than people who don't and therefore deserve more respect, even if that money was handed to them on a silver platter. Snowflakes and gen-xers are by far the worst today, but I've met plenty of baby-boomers that also need a spanking and to be sent to their rooms. It's rapidly becoming "Chinese privilege" anyway.
It is not just a meme, people are in denial of the 'white privilege' because the truth will piss them off and their hardships might mean nothing to others. People have survived because of their lack of guilt and empathy. They live by denying the reality, denying that racial inequality does not exist, especially if they have the racial advantage. And by making other people feel bad so they feel better about themselves. And most people have survived by accepting the harsh truth. And one thing is for sure, I'm not going to deny the existence of 'white privilege', it is real and it is happening. Do you still want me to renumerate some examples based on other people's perspective? I'm not going to deny the reality and no strangers online, not even people in real life could ever convince me to deny the truth. Nobody can tell me how to think. The divide has existed for a long time and as I get older, I surely understand very well the intense hatred, violence and lack of trust everywhere. And of course, they won't tell you 'those things'. I'd rather accept the inconvenient truth than fall for their psychopathic tactics. I'd rather know the reality than fall for what the deniers instill in other people's minds (for the deniers' own benefit). People have been made to be gullible so other people can live off them. The deniers taught people how to be weak. I guess you got to be someone else for you to understand that. Like what do we know about oppression and injustice anyway? What do we know about being other people? We only have opinion but no clue. If true freedom requires bloodbath and further divide, so be it. I don't care. I'd probably join the war if I have to lol. Gosh, that's how bad it is you have no idea. Whether you like it or not, I found out that as I traveled, the majority of population (non white) think like me. What they didn't tell you!
I also urge you to examine and understand other people's perspective and what brought them to think that way. Instead of giving unsolicited advice, self-righteous and superior perspective. Or as if you understand their hardships very well. Even if it's really hard for you because you have no idea what it's like or what people have gone through for centuries. Comparing your hardships to theirs is nothing, please. I don't know why some people keep on doing that on my posts as if the hardships are comparable and the same (I've already unfollowed some simply because I have no time and patience to prove my point to those who don't get it). But I totally understand that it is due to the white perspective domination here on Steemit, sigh. But understanding is all one can do instead of being defensive and in denial.
Didn't mean to push any buttons. Sorry. I guess meme wasn't the proper term. I'm not in denial of so called "white" privilege. That phenomenon, the attitude that those in control should continue to be in control at the expense of everyone else is definitely alive and well in the world. I just think that continuing to insist that it is entirely racial creates hatred against innocent people who don't support that agenda at all.
Certainly, the white races are responsible for it. White barbarians had pretty much conquered Western Europe by the end of the 13th century. They then established trade routes, built ships and proceeded to conquer the rest of the world, destroying local cultures to instill and enforce their own and their adopted Semitic cult of Catholicism. Whites certainly believed themselves to be superior in every way and also believed that heathens were animals one could slaughter with the blessings of God. The world was pretty much conquered by the whites by the end of the 19th century via opium wars, technological superiority and genocide. The 21st century is just the mop-up stage in world conquest.
No question that so called "white" privilege was instigated by the white races either, but I don't know if you've noticed yet, but the white race is a dying out race and yet the phenomenon you refer to as "white" privilege is still expanding to every corner of the globe. It's has become cultural, political and economic and it's racial overtones are dying out.
Let me give you another example. Right now I live in an area that has several large American Indian reservations. The inhabitants refer to themselves as Indians and the whites around them consider them Indians. They have casinos, get government assistance and special rights. But the thing is that the last full blooded Kumeyaay died out in the 1930s. Most of these "Indians" don't even have a full-blooded grandparent and have surnames names like Wieschadel and Gomez. They're a mixed-race people and not Indians at all but they have so-called Indian privilege.
Up in Canada it's the same thing. "First Nations" people, who are all of mixed race have ancestral rights to fish, require no licenses, can use gill nets, have no limits and fish whenever and wherever they please. They quite often snag salmon and then go sell them in town for beer money. The the non-Indian people have to pay fees, are severely restricted in not only the way they catch fish but when and how many they are allowed. Canada brutally oppressed the natives up until quite recently, but now proudly proclaims any absence of racial discrimination, but seems to ignore this bit of racial favoritism. That's why I pay no attention to those racist laws. I'm a native too.
I don't wish to argue whether the aboriginals of Turtle Island should be compensated for the pain inflicted upon them by their conquerors. I think the conquerors should give it all back, but that's fuel for a different discussion.
I've already stated that I know I'm an elite, that I can travel the world when most of the world is struggling to survive. The average street person in the US is far better off than most in the third world. I share your indignation at their plight and their slavery to a system they have no way of changing peacefully. I'm with you on that. I also know that nothing in my life could compare with the suffering of the poor in third-world countries. I was lucky to be born inside the homeland of the empire. Had I been born 14 miles south, I would be a Mexican. There is no comparison.
My only concern is that you examine the racist overtone of the term white privilege and realize it is every bit as harmful as Hitler's insistence that Jews were responsible for all the problems in the world. It's a loaded term used to instill racial hatred, even self-loathing if you are white and use it. The very people you wish to depose are the ones who thought that term up. It's not an innocent term. The true elites of the world employ word smiths to further their divide and conquer agenda. They are the ones who have changed "global warming" to "climate change" and "pro-abortion" to "pro choice." (and please don't think that I'm trying to promote or deride either of those two ideas, I'm simply using them as examples that powerful forces never cease the quest to control people's minds through wording and memes.)
There are places that I cannot go because the people there look at my skin color and want to kill me. I've been threatened and I've been chased and fortunately I've always managed to escape. They don't know me. They make an incorrect assumption based on their idea of history, on conjecture, and then link that to the way I look. I never want to promote that sort of thing.
I'm not trying to get you to change your mind, either. I think our opinions about the world are pretty close. I just want you to think about the power of the written word and realize that you might be innocently promoting something that you are totally against simply by using the wrong wording. I think we're both trying to open minds here.
I will freely use 'white privilege' term when I see it 'appropriate' or to make people in real life aware. This is the right term that just says it all. Just as I see every day how people freely use other terms to refer to the 'majority' of people. And everyone's fine with it. The environment just conditioned the white people that they are prone to not getting hurt. But it is not true. Or I'll just use the term to just shock those who are visiting who think we know nothing about them. Make them get off their uppity high horses from time to time or something. Recognize their BS. Well as they say 'know thy enemy'.
If you feel that it will increase awareness, I'm all for it. However, it seems to me that the term will have little effect on those who exhibit white privilege while instilling racial hatred in underprivileged non-whites. It's your call. Let me know how it goes.
So easy for you to be idealistic, reminds me of my youth. I wonder how you'd be like when you have this feeling. But you're lucky you never have to experience it. Here's for you.
If I lose my idealism I become like everyone else, pragmatic and then, Machiavellian. Not going there.
I live by Baldwin's quote. People deride me for it because it dents their comfort bubble. That won't change either.
Sadly, that is how the world operates right now. The Machiavellian alpha males of the world.