Salvation: a right or a privilege?

In my five hour driving class, the instructor discussed the means by which we enter The Driving Society. He asked if driving was a right or a privilege. Of course, clearly, it was a privilege. But before we answered, he wanted us to define the difference between a right and a privilege. The girl who was brave enough to raise her hand in answer to the question, said that a right is something that is guaranteed to you and a privilege is something you have to earn. As soon as she said earn, my mind though about salvation (I'm such preacher's kid, I mean what normal person just thinks about salvation in the middle of their 5 hour class?). As I was thinking about it, I would have thought that Salvation was a privilege because it sounds nicer than right but the answer was staring at me from my paper because like any nerd, I had already written down what was said and what I thought about it. Salvation could not be a privilege because you cannot earn it. Salvation had to be a right. Like the right to vote. You can choose to vote or not but that is your protected right as a citizen of this country over the age of 17. The instructor corrected the girls definition of a right by saying it is something we are entitled to not guaranteed because sometimes our rights are not guaranteed, especially if you are a black man. I thought about how much more our right to salvation is protected than our right to vote has been protected in the past, how much more we are guaranteed salvation than we are entitled the right to vote. You know what really sucks? The majority of people will be lost and not saved, not because the right to salvation is not guaranteed, but because we're more concerned about the physical world we can see, in which our protected right to vote elects a president like Bush, than we are about the spiritual world that we cannot see, in which our right to salvation is merited by Jesus Christ. Food for thought: How can I make the spiritual world more apparent to myself and those around me?