“It could be worse,” Samantha says.
“Yeah, that’s true,” Gregor says. “I’m always telling myself that. Things might be shitty but ir’s always worse for somebody else. I mean, at least I’ve got a roof over my head.”
“You’re middle-class.”
“My parents are middle-class.”
“Same difference. The chances that you’ll starve to death in the streets are pretty slim.”
“I’m educated.”
“You’re white.”
“I’ve got my health.”
“You’re not stuck in one of those bubbles for the immuno-suppressed.”
“I’m not some dissident being tortured in a cell somewhere.”
“You’re not toiling in an African diamond mine.”
“I’ve still got both eyes.”
“You’re young. You have no terminal diseases. You don’t even smoke.”
“Not very well. I’m not in any danger of being conscripted.”
“You’re not on trial for a crime you didn’t commit.”
“I didn’t just learn that my son deals drugs.”
“You haven’t been decapitated by a flying helicopter rotor.”
“No tornadoes have passed through my town in recent memory.”
“You’re not the only thing that stands in the path of total destruction of all life on earth as we know it.”
“In conclusion, I am a totally privileged individual, and any sort of dissatisfaction I feel is just middle-class whining, the post-teen angst of a spolied bourgeois only child born to parents who are so bourgeois they didn’t even get divorced, so I might as well just shut up and be happy because nobody wants to hear it out of me anyway.”
“That’s right,” Samantha says. They sit there on the porch and watch the squirrel.