Entitlement

I have been thinking about entitlement lately. There is an old joke that there are two types of people in the world - those who believe there are two types of people and those who don't.  I am more of a spectrum type person philosophically. For example, people aren't either good or bad, everyone is a bit of both but there are those who are more toward the totally good end whereas others are closer to the opposite end.

This is true with entitlement as well but in my mind there is a cleaner dividing line in the middle. If you believe life is about doing good for others then you are the non-entitled side. If you think the world owes, you are are on the entitled side.

I recently heard a couple stories on the radio about young graduates. One was about a woman who graduated from a fairly prestigious public university over a year ago but was still living with her parents. She was working part-time as a waitress because that was all she could find. She thought the school should reimburse her the cost of tuition. I am sorry but anyone of reasonable intelligence who says they can't find full time work today just isn't trying. Maybe she wasn't able to get the nice cushy six figure 30 hour a week she had hoped to land with her history major but she has no one to blame but herself for that. I put her pretty high on the entitlement quotient.

Contrast that with another story I heard about a woman who had just received her PhD in a hard science.  She was an undocumented immigrant who came to the country as an infant with her parents. She never had any help with school, financially or otherwise. She wasn't even able to apply for most scholarships given her undocumented status. She made it by working hard. And the kicker is that she wanted to make her parents proud for all they had done for her. She felt lucky. She is rather low on the entitlement quotient I would say.

People such as Spring who not only believe that world exists to take care of them but even when they have everything they could possibly want commit the most heinous crimes to get even more have about as high an entitlement quotient as there is.