I’ve got a weekend to-do list as long as my arm but I’ve also got something to say about the slow death-by-a-thousand-cuts of so many aspects of the minimum wage, unemployment, and direct aid pieces of the American Rescue Plan in Congress and I’m just gonna make time for it, hope you will too, here goes.

When I was 26, I was already Director of Development at a nonprofit. This put me on the core management team where I was the trusted right hand (and quasi-daughter) to the CEO. I was proud of this but unsurprised, since my entire life experience to date had told me that I was a Smart Person and as such should be In Charge.

We signed me up for a speakers’ bureau that sent me out to do donation pitches to groups of employees at local workplaces. That was how I ended up in the break room of a Costco around Christmastime of 1998, making the single worst speech of my life.

Now, I had started babysitting at age 12, got my work permit at 14 to get hired at Burger King, and held part-time jobs from waitressing to retail to secretarial all the way through high school and college. My parents let me keep a slice for pocket money, and the rest went into my college savings account; but that was always clearly about bringing me up not to be a spoiled brat rather than any doubt that our middle class family would put me through college-and-probably-Harvard, which indeed turned out to be the case.

So, based on my own life experience, I looked out at this audience of 20 people who had volunteered more or less willingly to allow me to talk at them during their hard-earned break — and I tried to be funny and folksy by joking around about how they must eventually want to move on to better jobs. I may even have used the phrase “real careers.” I dunno, it’s all a horrible Actor’s Nightmare kind of blur, because I realized at the time from the increasingly stony silence in the room that I was digging myself into a deeper and deeper hole but I couldn’t figure out how to stop.

We did not get any donations that day. I did not get any sleep that night.

The next morning, I called the Costco manager who had arranged the meeting and I apologized. She said she knew I hadn’t meant it “that way” because I seemed like such a nice pretty young lady. Oof. White woman privilege, and more grace than I probably deserved. But to give my 26-year-old self a modicum of credit, at least I let this experience in and let it change me

Flash forward, and this memory is heavy on my heart because we’ve got a Senate full of people whose life experiences are like mine – minus the Costco break room epiphany. There’s so much that people like me don’t know. Even at our best, we’re trying to solve problems we don’t really understand. At our worst, we don’t even see the problems AS problems because we never encountered them, so why would we try to solve them?

Which brings me to my central point here. (Yeah, I know, took me long enough.)

THIS is why it is so important for all of us good prosperous White liberals to stop putting ourselves in charge of deciding when and how to push for shifts in policy. If we really want to be changemakers, we have got to push ourselves out of the way and push for SHIFTS IN POWER to the people closest to the issues.

We are not the right ones to know what’s needed, or to decide when giving up is justified versus when to play hardball. My economic and racial experience is over-represented even among Senate Democrats, AND IT SHOWS.

Go ahead and tell me that so-called purity tests aren’t the way Dems are gonna attract more moderates, compromise is part of governance, and we need unity.

And I’ll tell you that I will agree with you … just as soon as the people experiencing the issues most directly agree too. When the most marginalized, literally disenfranchised, systematically exploited and oppressed folks say it’s time to compromise and unify to make more prosperous and powerful moderates happy, okeydokey!

Until then? Watch out for Smart People like me who keep walking into Costco breakrooms and Senate hearings thinking they deserve to be In Charge, and keep walking out again without learning a damn thing.