“He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious.”
– Sun Tzu

Choosing which battles you fight and do not fight has been a cornerstone of strategy probably for as long has strategy has existed. One can look at the history of military strategy* as a sequence of wrestling** matches writ large, with each of the opponents trying to force the other to fight on their terms.

More recently, the strategy of ‘Picking your battles’ has been applied to many other, more mundane confrontations. When someone accosts you on the street, when the phone company charges you two dollars extra, when that person bumps into you in the supermarket.

And this makes sense. You don’t want to go through your life fighting or arguing with everyone all the time.

But what if you don’t have a choice?

What if every time you walk downtown near your office by yourself, people make sexual comments about you? What if you’re never selected for a job interview because of your name? What if every time you express yourself online, you receive death threats?

Yes, you could avoid doing all those things, or you could do them and simply endure, but is that really picking your battles? You’re having wars of attrition waged against you every day.

Huge parts of the modern reading of ‘pick your battles’ implies that you can win some, or some substantial portion of them.

If you can’t win most, or even any of them, can you really be said to be ‘picking your battles’?

Having battles that you can win is a privilege. Choosing which battles to fight is a privilege. Even choosing which battles to choose from is a privilege.

A privilege that not everyone has.

*This is assuming they knew what they were doing…History is rife with examples of belligerent parties who did not know what they were doing***.

**Perhaps more ‘push hands’ than wrestling…

***Of course, this is often difficult to know with certainty, as the victors generally write the history books…

It takes privilege to be able to do this…