Blasting listener-supported community radio (the kind that thinks that Beck and Coldplay are still the two most innovative artists on the circuit) as you cruise in the car pool lane on the way to your Teach for America position in Long Beach, you feel as if you are the paradigm of the new generation.

Even though your parents still want you to go to Law School (just so you can have some more options), you realize that the point of being young and alive is doing what you love. Such an idealist!

Unfortunately, your minority students, who you are so generously trying to educate on the subject of global warming, are more interested in wanting to know how it is possible for such an idealist to exist in this cruel world. The concept of a parental subsidized salary is as foreign to them as the concept of economic self-sufficiency is foreign to you.