I’ve rather lost my patience for their excuses. I was raised middle class. But some people would even attempt to place me in upper middle class because I attended private school for all of my primary and secondary education. My college tuition was prepaid even though I attended a pretty average state college with that money. One thing I can say for sure is that I was very sheltered from the typical economic problems that the majority of US citizens face.

In fact, I didn’t know until I was eighteen that people’s parents didn’t pay for their college. I saw it as an extension of high school which my mom paid for. So I only assumed that everyone else’s parents were paying for them to go there.

Once I realized that not only was college not something a person “had” to attend. But that people chose to attend it and had to figure out how to pay for it. I employed my common sense.

I remember that I watched a documentary on the school lottery once when I was nineteen or so and just sitting at home eating mini oatmeal cookies. I remember crying and thinking about how I had complained so many times about having to wear uniforms. Yet here were these mostly black families begging to get into uniforms.

I explained all of this only to say that all it took me was a few instances of observation to figure out how vastly unequal this system must be. I’m not known for my practicality and I’m a very spacey, artistic individual. Yet somehow even with my reality avoidant personality. When I realized that my college was paid for and that something like half the country had to take out loans. It was easy for me to realize that clearly I had an advantage and just based on numbers it couldn’t be a level playing field.