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At this exact moment I am standing on Josh’s cabin porch, breathing in the fresh spring air. I gaze out over the tendrils of multi flora rose that enclose the syrup giving maple trees, creating a living barrier between the forest and manure covered cow pastures. All the while Paul Simon spins under the needle. The sun is shining on my journal, making it necessary for me to dun my statement sunglasses as the breeze slips under my haphazardly cut shirt, warming my recently crepe satisfied belly. It’s a lovely, perfectly spectacular day at Putney, yet it is soon to be dismissed from all our minds. This perfect life is all but extraordinary, if anything it is extra ordinary. While my experiences here may seem fantastical to others who have never been here, I live in this world everyday, and am bored by it almost as frequently. I take for granted how fortunate I am to have found myself here.

My mind wanders to the streets of Greenfield, Massachusetts, where Nora, Tomas, Sal, and I traveled on Saturday to go thrift hopping shopping. Main Street was cute and everything you’d expect a small town to have on display: small, independently owned businesses, little ice cream parlours, antique stores, and coffee shops offering organic beverages and snacks. Yet, if you dared to turn down a side street, a far different view replaced the calm, downtown niceness. Instead of three young women in sundresses advertising a boutique, you were met by older men in ratty clothes out on the street in front of a bar with beer and cigarette each. Replacing a mother walking a stroller carrying a child, two smoking women in clothes that didn’t fit and unclean teeth argued down the sidewalk.

There are countless places in America where these conditions are prevalent, Detroit, Southie, Baltimore, Chicago. But rarely are the people who live outside these communities aware of the conditions. With all the recent turmoil in Baltimore, news coverage has skyrocketed, and the media streaming into the publics eye sockets is filled with images of trashed streets, decrepit buildings, an overwhelming idea of misfortune, a foreboding sense that one may never make it out once they have been pushed in. One of the chains locking the gate to the “real world” shut is the belief in stereotypes. Ghettos and slums host a plethora of conceptions: over abundant drug use, teen pregnancy, high school dropout, gang activity, violence; and even if they proved to be in fact misconceptions, the world believes them and thus acts accordingly.

My mind leaves the dingy grayscale city and finds its way back to the safety of the tulip guarded porch. The fact that so many or so less fortunate than me strikes a chord. I am not wealthy in any sense of the word. In fact, most of the stereotypes of the ghetto fit my family: my parents were users as teens, my mother became pregnant at fifteen and delivered me at sixteen, my father missed eighty days of school during his senior year (my fault) and almost didn’t graduate. Luckily for them though, they lived in Melrose, Massachusetts, where gang activity is basically non-existent. From two extremely low income families, my paternal  grandmother had to heat water on the stove to fill up the bathtub with warm water in order to bathe themselves, while the other had eleven people living under her roof. But I was fortunate enough to be the exception.

Okay, so I feel as though I just bragged that I made it, but that’s not what I meant to do. I want to highlight that others are not so fortunate. Others may not have the planets miraculously align for them. Others may not have the chance to escape the prison away from prison. Others may not defeat the stereotypes and the disadvantages and the prejudice. Others may not be as fortunate as others. Here at Putney, there is wealth everywhere. No, not only present in the kid’s from all over who need both hands to count how many private jets they own no help to pay tuition for four years of high school, at least four years of college, and maybe a few years in elementary school.

No, we also have the privilege of not worrying about who we are, or what we do, or the consequences our actions may ignite due to our financial standing. We are a privileged folk here, and, if anything, I think we should acknowledge that.