Posted on 01/10/2012 5:03:46 PM PST by SJackson
I think of all the couples with advanced degrees who have remarkably successful children, and I wonder how other kids can enjoy such success. Charles Murray has long made this a theme of his. The full account can be found in The New Criterion. "Many [in the new elite] have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn't have a college degree, never hunted or fished." Here is the excerpt from today's WSJ:
The members of America's new upper class tend not to watch the same movies and television shows that the rest of America watches, don't go to kinds of restaurants the rest of America frequents, tend to buy different kinds of automobiles, and have passions for being green, maintaining the proper degree of body fat, and supporting gay marriage that most Americans don't share. Their child-raising practices are distinctive, and they typically take care to enroll their children in schools dominated by the offspring of the upper middle class--or, better yet, of the new upper class. They take their vacations in different kinds of places than other Americans go and are often indifferent to the professional sports that are so popular among other Americans. Few have served in the military, and few of their children either.
Worst of all, a growing proportion of the people who run the institutions of our country have never known any other culture. They are the children of upper-middle-class parents, have always lived in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and gone to upper-middle-class schools. Many have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn't have a college degree, never hunted or fished. They are likely to know that Garrison Keillor's monologue on Prairie Home Companion is the source of the phrase "all of the children are above average," but they have never walked on a prairie and never known someone well whose IQ actually was below average.
From the full article, his conclusion:
The upper middle class in general, and the new upper class in particular, will continue to do well. But they will no longer be living any resemblance of what used to be called the American Way of Life. They will be the class on top in the same way that all complex societies have had a class on top, with nothing exceptional about it. We are perilously close to being in that world already....
nt & Fishtown--On diverging classes in the United States (long)
I grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago on the North Shore. (I was one of those who dragged down the average income!) I remember a series of shocks as I matured and went out into the real world; i. e. the first time I saw children looking for something to eat from a garbage can overseas. I see the young people growing up in my home town now and think of it as an “affluent ghetto,” a place where the children grow up with the same kind of tunnel vision of the world as the kids in the city projects.
And when the SHTF they will be amongst them that can not fend for themselves and live off the land if needed.
There isn’t going to be any SHTF. At least not in the way many conservatives believe.
How about in the way the Bible says there will be with around 2/3 of the worlds population dying?
Sorry, but the elite urbane rich like sports. I don’t know about Boston, but they certainly do in NYC and DC.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.