I'm your typical white bread suburban cracker. I've been poor and I've even lived on the street for a short time but the sense of entitlement to better was always there. It was weird. I've always been oddly aware of it, probably because my health has caused me to fall through the holes in our tattered system more than once.

That entitlement is reinforced all over the place simply because of the way I speak and present myself to the world, the way I was taught in infancy by suburban, educated parents.

Entitlement for a lot of people is the basic culture they were brought up in and they don't know it's there until it's threatened, often by people who are only pointing it out.

Conversely, people who are not entitled by birth to a certain place in the social order but who make a lot of money despite the odds against it often have a hard time if they try to move up a class or two. Since they don't present themselves the way entitled people do, they're not accepted no matter how ostentatious their lifestyle. The latter is why so many of them die broke.

Entitlement is a bizarre thing when you recognize your own, really difficult to escape even when you see it for what it is, hitting you with guilt if you don't live up to it.

It's a lot more comfortable if you don't recognize it and that's probably why people hate it when you point theirs out to them.