Yeah, kind of. I was standing in the barn the other day, watching this seven-year-old girl riding her personal horse; it's not her first one, either. Probably her third, and they've all been purebred saddlebreds. Her dad drives an old convertable, one of those that are really fancy because they're old. The girl rides several times a week, attends every week of summer camp, boards her horse(s) at the barn (it's close to a thousand dollars a month to do so) and shows maybe twenty or thirty times a year.
I once thought that I was equal with her, or at least close to it. I had a good childhood, I come from an upper-midclass family, one that can afford to let me ride at this barn. But while I stood there, watching her prance around on this horse, watching the way that the instructor taught her versus how she taught me, I realized that we aren't, and that we'll never be. There's this huge gap that I never saw before that moment, one that now I can almost feel now; it's almost tangible, something I can touch if I try hard enough. And it sickened me, because that girl will never know what it's like to barely have enough to live by, like I do now as a college student. There's tons of people like that around the country and the world, and then there's people who don't know when they'll even see food again.
