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"How come your kid's going to a public school?" I ask.

"Whaddya mean 'How come?' She's got a right to go to a public school in our neighborhood, hasn't she?" you answer.

"Sure, that's her right. Tell me, what's she plan to do when she grows up?"

"She's going to be an elementary school teacher," you say.

"Does she have a right to teach school?"

"Sure she does. Well, of course, first she has to get her education degree from college. Then she'll have to do some interning. And she'll need certification. After that, come lots of interviews. There might even be a 'search' if that's the rule nowadays. Then, we'll just have to wait and see. But we think she'll have all the qualifications."

"Qualifications?" I ask. "But she didn't need a lot of 'qualifications' to be a pupil in elementary school."

"That's different," you say.

"You said it. That's an entirely different ballgame. I just wanted to point out that teaching in the public schools is a privilege, not a right."

These days rights and privileges seem to get mixed up in the U.S.

There is also an unfortunate and very confusing misuse of the word "underprivileged." I believe that many people who are referred to as "underprivileged" are actually people who are short on fundamental rights, and not privileges.

Our courts deal with deprivation of people's "civil rights." Have you heard of any lawsuits concerned with loss of "civil privileges?"

What privileges are guaranteed to us under the Constitution? Exactly none. We are guaranteed the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." We are not guaranteed happiness, only the right to pursue it.

Privileges in American life reside in one's own private domain, and are properly obtainable only through one's own efforts, education, talents, ambitions, hard work and, often, just plain old luck.

No one has a right to be born talented, rich, or good-looking. But lots of people are born with some or all of these goodies.

We have the opportunity to develop whatever talents are our heritage. We can work hard to become affluent.

Taking care of our bodies helps us to look good and the U.S. offers us the skills of the best dentists and plastic surgeons in the world to help us look the way we wish nature had created us. Jack Kennedy once said, "Who said life is fair?" JFK should have known. He was born rich and handsome, and had access to the best of everything in life. But at the end he was dealt the unkindest cut of all when his life was brutally snuffed out. In an instant, an assassin stole his civil rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

With all your problems, would you rather be you, alive, or Jack Kennedy, dead?

His problems are long since over. You can still work to solve yours.

On the day after Pearl Harbor, I took the subway from Cambridge into Boston and enlisted in the U.S. Navy. The Navy decided I should go to Officer Candidate School and become a "90-day wonder." An officer's commission is a privilege, not a right. Before I left the Navy's Boston premises that day, I gave a urine sample, and suffered much worse indignity. A hospital corpsman took blood from my arm for a lot of tests the Navy had a mind to run. Nobody asked me if I minded being stuck with a needle or having the facts of my state of health made public.

None of us enlistees took umbrage when we were herded together and asked to take an oath that we had no allegiance to any foreign government, and were not Nazis or communists.

Having just studied Plato's "Republic" in college, I readily accepted on philosophical terms the treatment I received from the Navy that day in Boston, and through four years aboard ship until that day in 1946, when I took off the uniform.

Plato and his colleagues concluded that the best possible definition of "justice" is the "greatest good for the greatest number." This concept of justice made sense to me then, and it makes sense to me now.

One fact is clear: The sacrifice of that minority of Americans who actually had to fight the war against totalitarianism, often at the cost of their own lives, guaranteed the survival of life and liberty to the many millions of their countrymen.

Today we are in a constant state of national emergency. We are engaged in a losing war to preserve our collective and individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Drugs, disease and violence threaten our lives. Dishonesty in our banking institutions and in our stock exchange dealings may threaten our financial freedom. The selfish insistence by many people who control our destinies that their privileges are actually their rights can dangerously inhibit our pursuit of happiness in this one life we are given.

We routinely put our existence or the state of it in the hands of airline pilots, railroad engineers, bus and taxi drivers, firefighters, doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, the military, school teachers, and politicians of all ilks, to name but a few who are privileged to hold positions of public trust.

Do we not have the right to ensure that these privileged few deliver "the greatest good to the greatest number"?

If I were asked, as one who has enjoyed the privilege of teaching in a state university, to offer reasonable proof that I was not "on drugs," or did not have AIDS, I would never have objected. I believe that the public whose taxes paid my salary had a right to know that their children were not being taught by a drug addict or a person carrying communicable disease.

I think that the public has the right to know if the privileged engineer of an Amtrak train is high on marijuana.

I think that privileged airplane pilots should be willing to prove that they are not flying with a blood-alcohol content that would make it illegal for them to drive a car to the airport.

Ask those privileged few who have given up their personal liberties and have risked their lives in wartime for the good of all if they would "draw the line" today at submitting to a needle prick or peeing in a bottle.

In today's perilous times, the privileged among us must be ready to make small sacrifices to preserve the rights of us all.

Plato might ask, "After all, what else makes any sense?"