Privilege (Original Poem)

Elizabeth Ulanova
2 min readJan 21, 2024

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History is his story and manmade by his hands

Power shifting downward from scape to land

Myths of fables disguised as the truth

Yet if you asked to be included there is only the ‘why’ in you

Generations of wealth given only to the lucky chosen

Like how manifest destiny was just occupied pre-destination

If black tears and dark labor can be justified through time

Then who are the ones that should be justly vilified?

Since organs dictate position and color dictate ammunition

Bruising each other only to be someone else’s competition

So if you quietly obey structure it is simple to see gender, stature, and race

Yet if you looked only a bit closer, there is no difference in each and every human face

Stories are told to give glory only to the victor

Yet every great rumor begins as a tiny biased whisper

Marking a price for each value is like pre-selecting every actor

But that would only be valid if life only had one supreme director

Architecture of norms built vividly on paradigm

Only to steal from the earth for what is yours, and what is mine

Our sense of reality is shaped by social perception

But you forget that reality is created from cognitive distortion

One can argue that this planet is an open arena, a titanic battlefield to be conquered at every stage

But who is given the platform of what is right and what counts as incorrigible hearsay?

If to be ‘A’ is to be primitive and to be ‘B’ is to be cultured

Then perhaps take a finer inspection at who is the victim and who is the vulture

When you balance the equation with factors of beliefs, religion, and education

Then you are committing to the subjectivity of who to lock out and who to lock in

If to exist in one parallel is to deny the existence of another

Then please pause and please think, what does that really mean for our collective future?

Wars of calculated decisions placed upon strategies of political alliance

But do not neglect that the cruelest of syllables is intently one that of silence

For what is considered valor and for what is considered courage

When morality is allowed to be slaughtered and genocide is publicly encouraged?

Marched in arms towards a more majestic and more glorious tunnel vision

Yet disregarding our conformity for more wreckage, more loss, as if an insignificant performance

It is a grand statement to exist in an age of an undeniable machine revolution

But what is the purpose of such technology when we have not evolved past cognitive dissonance?

They say the whole world is anew when lived through a child, the beginning of a new salvation

Yet the consequence of every decision becomes the burden of the next generation

If privilege is the bred product from a human created selective nurture

Then we must take responsibility and hold ourselves accountable for a deeply flawed human nature

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Elizabeth Ulanova
Elizabeth Ulanova

Written by Elizabeth Ulanova

traveler| tech sociologist| visual artist| writer| 📍 landscape architecture @Harvard ’25 | @Cambridge ’20 | @Columbia ’19 | elizabethulanova.com

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