This really hit me when Masterpiece Theatre serialized a novel (the name escapes me) about a boy whose mother leaves the family and his father works hard to bring him up and he goes to Oxford or something and becomes a doctor, and meanwhile his father has taken up with a lovely, gracious, intelligent woman, and then the father gets stomach cancer and the son euthanizes him!
And the whole theme is "Wasn't this just the most MAHvellous wonderful relationship between a wonderful man and his wonderful son; and after all why should the man be deprived of love and companionship of a wonderful woman just because his first wife was a jerk; and finally wasn't it just the bravest most loving, kind and generous thing of the son to put him down like a dog by means of a big slug o' morphine!"
And I believe this was a novel of maybe the 1920's.
My dad was born in 1904 in the US; went to Harvard. My mom was born in 1920 in the UK and was a commie (studied economics at Oxford under Keynes) right up until the Nazi-Soviet pact. This was the trendy, quasi socialist, Christian but without all those awkward old fashioned ideas, don't you know innerleckshual milieu. As close-minded and provincial as anything one might find in, say, Alaska?
Actually moreso, because the Divine Sarah is humble, while my folks were pretty confident that they were the cream of the innerleckshual crop.
It's all interesting and a little sad.
Your post reminded me of something. I have heard Michael Medved speak many times on his radio show about how he’d hitchhike from Yale all the way to home in Southern Cali. He said he really had his eyes opened when he’d be picked up by truckers who’d be playing Schumann on their tape players and have such intelligent view and thoughts. He was exposed to a good cross section of America by hitching back and forth.
That’s how life gives one wisdom. Of course, the elites from the top universities think they are likened to the Oracle of Delphi or the Illuminati and are to show all of us mere mortals how we must listen to them for they know all.