Your advice is frank and useful straight-talk for privileged folks who feel trapped. It's something many Americans might find valuable if not so easy to hear. You can't have it all, you have to choose. Awesome. And many people need to hear it – they need to grow the heck up and make the tough choices. Agreed.

But you seem *fantastically* unable to fathom what it's like to be really poor. You apparently live so comfortably inside your class and race privilege that you can write these "tough love" sentiments and believe–I can see that you really BELIEVE–that they apply to everyone. You are clearly so committed to this position, based on your responses to the few objections that have been raised, that I'm not even sure that "getting out more" or "educating yourself" as a few people above have advised will do any good.

I won't try to change your mind by describing the tough life situations of people I know that disprove your thesis, partly because doing so would go too far toward legitimizing it. Instead, I will suggest that maybe you inquire into the source of your profound investment in believing that all people have a great deal of "choice" about what their lives look like, and in believing that that choice involves things like being able to "change careers" and "pick up and move to another city." Is it too painful to contemplate an America where some people don't have these options? Are you so afraid to confront your own white privilege? Maybe you should also consider that the fact that your life "hasn't been easy" and that you've had to make "sacrifices" does not in any way negate your privilege. Everyone's own life feels real and hard to them – that's normal and right. But we still all have to be able to recognize our structural position and advantages, and to think critically about them rather than resorting to flaccid and self-satisfied universalizing.

I am not trying to be harsh. As I said, I really value the things you have written and think they have great value and applicability to many if not most middle-class people. But your bizarre insistence that your proscriptions aren't class-bound, that they're essentially "universal"… it seems like you're smarter, and should know better, so I have to conclude that you have some hang-up about confronting the fact that some people are actually poor, with everything that entails.

Finally, I just want to say that although, believe me, I would be the LAST person to defend the offensive lady above… despite this, I do feel that the smugness with which you and some of your readers mock her "bitterness" over her lack of options, your blindness to her structural, material realities… I'm not saying change is impossible for her – I don't know anything about her life. But then, neither really do you. Call out the racism – by all means, call it out. But once that's done, we might use this as an opportunity to try to think about, and take seriously, the ways in which people's conditions of capital really can delimit their life options, rather than just mercilessly mock someone's bitterness over their own personal tragedy of a life.

Thank you for sharing your experiences, which are doubtless inspiring to many.

you may have different choices but only you know what is the best for you. Nobody else can fit it for you.