“I don’t deserve any of this. And neither do you.” - Justin Hudson

A recent NYT article highlighted a commencement speech given by a student at a “gifted” school. His speech criticized one topic that I have struggled with, entitlement. Am I entitled to be where I am today? 

As I ponder how the sequence of events that have allowed me to reach the point where I am today, I ask if I can credit myself for everything that I have accomplished. And although the response is should be more nuanced than the limits of this letter, the reality is that I am and all of us are “victims” of chance.  Why have I had the opportunities those others in my community can only dream of?

I didn’t choose to move to Florida when I was young and it follows that I had no bearing of my mastery of English given that my environment enriched my knowledge of language and not my own “hard-work”. Similarly, although one could call my city under-developed and crime-infested, I was not in control over the arrangement of school districts.

Where it not for a freeway, my elementary education could have been much different. I could have been entirely different. I was able to attend kindergarten through sixth grade in the next town over, a predominantly upper middle class, white-collar community. Can I really claim that my hard work or motivations are the only reasons I have been able to attend college? It’s tough to say.

Equality of opportunity, as it where, is a figment of the imagination, even in our societies. We pride ourselves on our top institutions of higher education, yet many of the children in our neighborhoods cannot read.

Our educational system is as much at fault as us, the citizens, are. And it comes back to what I opened this letter with, the culture of entitlement. Do we deserve our accomplishments? My studies have taught me to be a realist. In fact, isn’t our world fueled by greed? Gordon Gekko says, 

“Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the    
evolutionary spirit.”

But, greed absent from equity fuels the gap between the “entitled” and the disenfranchised. I am a strict believer in equality of opportunities. Greed is not fair; our education system is not fair when the hare has a five-minute head start on the tortoise.