Written by Randolph Trow 

Art by Eva Colabatistto 

Every day I look at my bank account and say, “Mother…fucker! Today’s gonna SUCK!!!” And to all the rich blueblood pricks who don’t say that shit, fuck you, and give me your money. 

I grew up going to an all-male, southern, K-12 private school where I was non-stop harassed by people who had no business harassing me. The only thing that set me apart from them was their parents sharing their wealth with their children. My parents believed that sending me to private school was sharing their wealth with their children, and never bought me anything unless they absolutely had to. I wore hand-me-down clothes for my whole life and ate whole-grain cheerios every single day with no variation. I mean, not a horrible life at all. My peers just made it seem that way. 

Here’s the best part, my parents weren’t even poor! My dad was an executive banker and my mom got over 50 grand a year with the summer off! And got me a faculty discount at the school I went to!. I am upper-class, and I now know it. I just remember extensively the constant, constant badgering of my classmates. How everyone was surprised I didn’t have a lake house, how I had to get a job, how Christmas presents were new clothes and books instead of massive shit that rich parents get their kids, how I have to pay 3 grand a year for college, which is a whole lot better than I was expecting (and also which is not even a drop in the bucket to these people!), and finally, how I had to share a room with my brother. These were just a few of the things that these assholes wouldn’t shut up about. 

That’s really the problem with this generation, isn’t it? Kids these days, or at least most of the ones I seem to find, seem to think that everything is expected and demanded, not earned and validated. Young people who go to private schools are surrounded by so much privilege and wealth that they are robbed of the opportunity to live a truly rich and fulfilling life before they even open their eyes for the first time. These people assume that the public persona of somebody is what they really are, even though their own public persona is a sham. It drives me crazy that people put so much stock into outside appearances and the second they see something they don’t like, they dismiss it and ridicule and scream at it. And I get it. Being rich is very difficult, isn’t it? You are taught to act as if you have earned this great opportunity, you walk on the backs of so many others that it becomes natural to demean those who are not valuable to you. It’s normal to wipe bugs off a windshield, yes? 

Crazy, crazy, motherfuckers. These people have gaslit themselves into believing they are oppressed by the very same people who feed them the silver spoon every single day, never understanding what the true bare minimum is. It is not fun to think about. Constantly. But what really irks me is that it’s not their fault. It’s the culture’s, and there’s no way that is ever getting fixed. So, the best case scenario is to just walk away from it. Walk away from the money, the status, and the friends, and then you’ll be fulfilled and happy. It’s what I did, and I feel way better about myself now than I did a few years ago. 

The second I left my bubble of private school, I began to realize that I was above the normal level of income. I ended up getting a job, like normal teenagers should be doing, which turned out to be very eye-opening to hear what some people had to say about my new place of work and the people that worked there. It was funny how everyone I spoke to was surprised at how I wanted to leave my bubble, since all they had wanted was to be where I was. The money definitely separated us, but we were able to connect on our mutual distaste of lazy rich people. They saw the rich patrons that arrived every day and just had to move on through life. They didn’t have the opportunities I did. But they kept working. While everyone I knew from school didn’t. 

Now I realize that they had no eye-opening bubble pop like I did, and that their life experience had been far more sheltered than even mine had been, and I couldn’t play Call Of Duty until I was 18. My experience taught me that there is a difference between those who have money and those that don’t, but additionally the difference between those that have their own money and those that have someone else’s money. 

It should be earned, not given. And that is why you should give it to me. All of it. I earned that shit, you didn’t. I got paid shitty minimum wage, you got an allowance. I worked my ass off and made connections through brute human interaction, your dad made you do everything and it was still hard for you to do the easiest thing on the planet. I have no respect for someone who truly complains about hard work, when they have the easiest life to lead. So give me your money. I deserve it. You deserve to have to work for it. Other people have earned it. You have not. Your Dad did not. Your Grandfather did not. You deserve to live life like the rest of us, and that is something that unfortunately, will never happen. Not in a million years. Justice is impossible for those who run the system, and the system of wealth is far more unreachable than any other. All we can do is keep living, and be ourselves. At the very least, they can’t take that away from us.