The scene I illustrated above is but one moment where I realized that the powers at be, the infamous ominous “they”, will never let me, or someone who looks like me, get a seat at that table. Maybe the kiddie table, but not the real one.

And that’s okay to me at least because reading that article I realized that “they” will never understand us anyways. They read that article and like my co-workers (who may look like the they, but are not the they) see something very different from what I see. So why would I want to eat with them. I’d much rather take the food from their table and share it with the hungry.

That perspective may come from a chip on my shoulder, but for better or worse I think it limits my chasing of the high that is status, and maybe that will help me avoid an addiction to the drug, money.

[A picture is worth a thousand words. I had a thousand words to work with but I’m no poet, and I think the picture came out unfocused. I tried to put a bow on what was a stream of consciousness for the sake of a word limit, but I don’t know if there are any real conclusions to be drawn. Just a single perspective, in a single instance.]

We don't actually know what other people in that room thought when they read the newspaper story you read, that is, if they did or if they could be asked to do so for us. We can't really assume anything on the basis of what they look like, or how long it has been since their families last loved and made room to include an immigrant (which we don't know about either). We don't know, even more deeply, what Kash thinks about what happened, is happening, will happen, in his life.

All those are spaces we could fill, to some extent, with conversations we and you haven't had. We do have, eloquently described, what you have thought. Reading those thoughts, recapturing the attitude expressed in them—which to the small extent I know you seems both real and right to me—does make me want to have some of those conversations, with Kash above all, but with some of the people in that room, to whom you do not introduce as, as well. I cannot tell how much or little you (that is, the you writing now, not the Daniel who read the newspaper and sat at lunch in that room) would also like to have those conversations. It would strengthen the essay very much, it seems to me, to have that further explored.

Some of the people I know who have committed crimes and paid a high social price for doing so are people about whom I feel the sorrow that comes from believing that under other circumstances I might have stood in their shoes. Some, on the other hand, I think have behaved in ways that I could never have behaved, no matter the circumstances of my life. This is also true of the other people I know (more of them) who have committed similar or different crimes and paid no price at all. I don't know how you feel about Kash in that sense; it would make the essay richer to know.

I wonder whether you wish you had asked anyone in that room about the story, and their sentiments. That too it would make the essay richer to hear about.

Substantively, the essay is about being excluded. That's both the psychological process in yourself you are exploring in the moment about which you write, and the analytic weight you are putting on the distinction between status and money. (I don't think, and I don't think you think, that we have differed. I have said that money is the psychoactive substance, like the molecule of opium or THC, that crosses the blood/brain barrier and creates a psychic effect; you have said that effect occurs in the feeling of status, of one's place in the world around one. I think that's true, or is part of the truth, so if we are disagreeing it would be helpful in the revision to see that disagreement made clearer.) But there—in that room, in this room, in many rooms to come—you are. Your exclusion is no more pre-determined than Kash's fate was predetermined, or mine. The essay shows, in the movements of your mind, why "they" can no more determine what happens to you. It would be the greatest help of all in understanding your essay to know whether (at this moment, not at that one) you are fully aware of that point.