Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Let us say that the kids in your high school—the ones who dropped out to work nights at the chicken plant, the ones who were snatched up by the tables of Army recruiters in your high school’s main corridor, the ones who disappeared into pregnancy, vocational school, alcohol, or drugs—would probably never have chosen you to be their voice, but that you spoke for them anyway because it enraged you when Columbia students attributed their life successes to hard work and talent, when plenty of hardworking, talented folks you knew were spending their days serving chicken-fried steaks and scrubbing floors and sweating through basic training. Let us confess that you were better able to see these injustices now that you were, for the first time in your life, the person whom others thought of as poor.

Let us explain that the Ensemble gigs—which you started working every weekend and almost always involved long journeys by car or plane—began on Thursday nights and ended on Sunday evenings: a seventy-two-hour work cycle with no time to study or write papers. Let us acknowledge that during the week you worked additional jobs. Let us confess that you struggled with addiction, that what began with coffee and then cigarettes accelerated into Adderall and cocaine, and that you used these stimulants to stay awake Monday through Thursday in order to work and study. You intended to graduate a year early to save money; because of this you signed up for heavy course loads. Let us acknowledge that stimulant abuse cut into The Money that you were staying awake to earn.

(Needing a job with health insurance to recover enough from an illness to get another job: an American paradox.)