It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of… - Joan Didion

[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.

"Privilege" is something else.
"Privilege" is a judgment.
"Privilege" is an opinion.
"Privilege" is an accusation.

Philippe Ariès, in a series of lectures he delivered at Johns Hopkins in 1973 and later published as Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, noted that beginning about 1930 there had been in most Western countries and particularly in the United States a revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. “Death,” he wrote, “so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.