Issues of Class

Pandagon: Class and marriage: "I cannot tell you how many times I had the jaw-dropping realization that friends of mine don't get that I have no safety net, nothing to cushion me that allows me to examine a creative career full-time. "

Maggie would love to have a summer internship with a human rights group, but she needs paid work and when she graduates, with more than $100,000 of debt, she will need a law firm job, not one with a nonprofit. So when Isaac one day teased her as being a sellout, she reminded him that it was a lot easier to live your ideals when you did not need to make money to pay for them.

I was born into a working/middle class family (hard to tell the line exactly). I have eaten government cheese. We were never on welfare. As we got older, it definitely got better. We lived closer to the edge when I was young than I probably even realize today. Even relatively recently, when by almost any measure we would be considered middle class, things were scary on occasion. My dad nearly died my senior year in high school. I was thisclose to not going to college at all. I would have went and got a job and that was that. There wouldn't have been a choice.

I went to college with a diverse group of people. There was the rich subset. And the richer subset. I obviously was in neither. And they had a couple different outlook on life than I could possible imagine. They had a lot of ideas about the way things were which I considered silly then and think is a sign of mental retardation now. Most had no clue what it meant to be limited by financial constraints. Many thought there were plainly better than other people. I will note not all. One of my best friends was extremely wealthy but you never knew it. So I won't say that class is deterministic but it is nearly so.