I don’t really belong to any minority groups. I’m white, I’m middle-class, as of this moment I am not disabled. I used to be Catholic which is kind of a minority, but it definitely doesn’t have the street cred that Judaism does. Catholics tend to be on the other side of persecution.

Anyhoo, the one thing I can cling to is the fact that I am left-handed. Approximately 10% of the population is left-handed, but only 2% of women are. I should acknowledge here that I learned that statistic from an interview with Nicole Kidman in Marie Claire magazine, circa 2005.

Left-handed people live in a world not built for us. Scissors are impossible, we can’t see the designs on our mugs when we drink our hot beverages of choice, desks in college lecture halls are miserable. Oh sure, there might be a left-handed desk on the end of every row, but usually some self-RIGHTeous a-hole has already claimed it and you have to climb over his privileged ass to get to a seat where you’ll spend the whole hour craning your arm around like a contortionist to take notes.

Our handwriting is usually pretty bad too. Also, apparently when the press is trying to photograph you signing your first executive order as president, they get annoyed because we hold our pens strangely (and usually drag our hands across the stuff we’ve written, smearing our words and getting ink on our hands), forcing us to say stuff like “I’m a lefty; get used to it.” That’s right. Lots of us are Presidents. Our current President, Clinton, the first Bush and Reagan….10% of the population but 18% of US Presidents. Although women are over 50% of the population and 0% of US Presidents, but that’s a different post.

In high school, I bonded with a fellow lefty who would do things like tell the outfielders to back up when I was up to bat when we played softball in PE. “Move back folks, we’ve got a lefty here!” Another time, in history class, when our classmates were complaining that Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried was too graphic and I was getting really upset with them, he held up a sign that said “They can’t handle war. LEFTY POWER!” Last time we talked, he told me he was engaged to a left-handed woman to keep the “bloodlines clean”. He’s doing his part to create a left-handed super-race and I couldn’t be prouder. Then maybe the rest of you will know what it feels like to be a minority.