Filthy Rich

Someone posted a list of things "poor kids" know, which uses vague language to describe to rich people what it's like to be a poor kid.  Reading it, if things didn't apply to me, they applied to a friend.

I grew up poor.  Not deprived- we had enough.  We didn't have cable or a dryer or an answering machine or insulation or air conditioning or multiple cars.  Some of those things came later, others, my parents still don't have.

But that's why I never thought we were poor.  Poor people didn't have phones or cars or soap.  But I was the kid filling out paperwork to qualify for scholarships to the gifted classes we couldn't afford, the kid who can recognise the difference between a gun shot and a car backfiring and doesn't worry about either, the kid who grew up astonished at the "mansions" her middle school friends lived in.

I've spent my entire life believing that "middle class" is rich, because I assumed that, not living like a character in a Dickens novel, that qualified as middle class.

I suddenly don't give a shit about the financial problems of the "middle class."  You're busy living lives of comparative luxury, you can afford much more than you think you can.  A woman I consider wealthy, married to a local celebrity, was in a rehearsal with me where she brought in a glass vase I knew to be a gift from the local PBS drives.  Someone admired it and she had an, "Oh, this old thing," and I (because I occasionally have no tact) said, "Isn't that a [pledge drive vase]?  Those are expensive." "Oh, not really, no."  "They're the $500 donation level."  "If you spread it over a year, it's a couple dollars a day.  It's less than we spend on coffee every morning, and it's a donation."

She later bemoaned the price of a college education and how hard it was for middle class families to send their children.

I don't bear her any ill will.  I'm just astonished that anyone who owns a remote start convertible with heated seats and spends more than 3 dollars a day for coffee can't figure out what to do to pay for a college education.  Like, maybe, reconsider your priorities as "college fund" not "luxuries."  Because they are.  But she doesn't know that because that's her life, any more than the super rich kids I knew had any idea what a broom was because their families had maid service.

I'm horrified to reconsider what rich is actually like when the kids I considered exceptionally wealthy now have to be viewed in the light of merely wealthy.