This morning, I read an article in the New York Times about an explosion in India that killed 126 people and injured hundreds more.  It took place at a temple where people had come from miles away to celebrate the Hindu New Year.  Apparently, although fireworks had been banned by the local authorities, some of the organizers of the event had them on hand anyway; when one firework misfired and landed on the building where the rest of the fireworks were stored, it set off a series of explosions that caused several buildings to collapse on the revelers.

The Times journalists write, “Public safety is a huge problem in India, where weak governance frequently results in the flouting of safety rules, leading to large numbers of fatalities.” This is the case not only in India, but in so many of the countries travel to in the course of my job. Weak governance isn’t the only cause: its is also often a symptom of poor infrastructure and a lack of economic resources to remedy the situation.

Reflecting on this story today brought me back to a concept that I’ve been pondering a lot lately: privilege.  Over the last few years, privilege has been hot topic in social media and in the blogosphere.  I am sensitive to the much needed discussion that is beginning to take place across this country about how embedded privilege is in our social system, and how that reinforces and magnifies inequality  and injustice. In the context of America, I myself come from a pretty privileged position: white, upper middle-class, highly educated parents who pushed me to even higher levels of education.

My position has given me opportunities to travel my whole life.  As I young child, I travel throughout the USA with my parents and my brother.  We never flew; we routinely drove from New York to Florida and from Vermont to Michigan.  In my early teens, we took a month-long road trip from the East Coast all the way to Washington, Oregon, and California.  I learned to love the ride…looking out the window for hours, watching the scenery change from one region to the next. As a teenager, I began to seek out opportunities to travel overseas, quickly becoming addicted to seeing new places and experiencing new cultures.

Two years ago, I had the opportunity to travel to India for the first time. More so than any of my previous travels to Ecuador, Mexico, Russia, or Mongolia, my trip to India opened my eyes to American privilege. Every citizen in this country has a much higher chance of growing up safe and healthy than a baby born in India. We have almost universal access to clean drinking water and indoor plumbing. We have much lower risk of catching an infectious disease, but if we do have to go to the hospital, we can trust that the doctors will be using clean instruments in sterilized conditions. And we are lucky to live in a place that places high value on public safety standards, and dedicated appropriate resources to ensuring those policies are enforced.

I’m not trying to minimize or discount the discussion about inequality or privilege in the United States.  We have a lot to work on.  And we SHOULD work on those issues, because we are collectively sitting in a place of privilege.