I love you. Isn’t that clear? Have my attempts to prove this to you, my letters to the vivacious woman who interviewed me and the gracious professor who took time out of her busy schedule to talk to me, my essay explaining my desire, my heart-felt pleas to your financial aid office and my email to your president not proven this? What more am I expected to do?
I lay prostrate at the feet of the Old West, tearfully hoping to enter its gates of promise, wisdom and heritage in a mere four months. You stand proud and so far unyielding before me, proclaiming over and over again the lesson I ought to have learned by now: You are in the middle class, you can ask for nothing more.
Middle class. Bourgeoisie. Oh, I know what it means to be nestled firmly in the middle of that all-hailed American class: it means you are stuck. No one from the upper classes to pity you and shower the money you honestly need upon you and everyone beneath you wishing they had as much. Oh, I understand that plight of the underclass, the terror and the dread that fills and consumes each day. But for once, just for once, could you have pity on America’s bleeding middle class? The middle class that pays the majority of our country’s taxes, the rich too pompous to pay and the poor struggling to properly make ends meet as it is. Can I, for once, be troubled to be understood?
How much longer must the working class be squeezed from all sides before the proper outrage and uproar is unleashed? How much injustice are we expected to withstand? How many times must we be told to be happy and content to be nestled so safely in the middle class when our plight could be so much worse?
Do you want the truth? If my family was low-income a multitude of internships and high-paying scholarships would be opened to me. If my family was low-income, our FAFSA generated EFC might actually make sense. But I am middle class. My father makes enough to consider us in that prized American ideal. That lusted over classification that causes the government to expect my family to pay a third of our income, lowering us to the low-income bracket, to pay for my college. That wished for stature that leaves me with slammed doors because “your EFC says $32,000,” despite my outcries that my parents can only afford $6,000.
When will the system understand? When will the system care? What am I to do?
The middle class is bleeding. The middle class is hemorrhaging. And no one seems to care. The rich get richer. The poor gets poorer. The middle class gets ignored.
So, Dickinson, I suppose this plea is not as much to you as it is to the rest of our ignorant country. But make a stand—attempt commiseration. Show sympathy in the struggle we are faced with. This question is so much greater than me.
What is college? Something for only the super-rich and the poor? Does anyone care about the education and the welfare of the middle class? Or is the expectancy a cycle? The rich get richer, the poor get to college and pull their families up to the middle class while the middle class falls to the lower class until its children can again arise?
Let’s really level the playing field. Let’s make things realistic for the middle class too.
Dickinson—you could be the one to start. You’re a forward thinking college. Think of the future of the middle class.
I’m begging you. I’ve been begging you. I’ll continue to beg you.
And I’ll go anyway, with your help or without it. And you count on that. That I, as a member of the middle class, am willing to risk debt, miles of debt, to receive the education I have been promised since I was young. The education I was told to pursue, no matter the cost. You count on me taking that literally.
And damn your assurances and your hopes–
You’re right.
I’m just another middle class American too tired to fight.
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