I don’t know how long this series will be: three posts, maybe four. And there’ll be nothing in it that could be considered profound or original – “stupidly obvious” might be a better description.
The unexceptional individual
While an exceptional individual may rise above his circumstances, you can’t expect that most children will graduate from run-down schools in dangerous neighborhoods and go on to post- high school education. And if they only have a high school education, and not a very good one at that, or even didn’t get to that point, again, once in a while an exceptional individual might surprise you, but that isn’t the norm. For the most part, they’ll get low-paying jobs without meaningful insurance. And they’ll live in poor housing, so their property taxes won’t support much of a school district, so their kids…
All this is predictable. A lot of things are predictable.
For instance, conservatives who grew up in suburban neighborhoods with good tax bases and the resulting decent schools, who went to college or technical school and got jobs with major corporations and have never been sick and uninsured at the same time, might predictably blame the people in the first paragraph for being lazy or reckless. You see, they read an inspirational story once about a kid who grew up in the ghetto and went on to invent something or become a star or whatever. So everybody who wasn’t exceptional, must simply not be trying.
In all this, you’d think they would recognize just how unexceptional, and how fortunate, they are. But they don’t; it’s the air they breathe. It’s neigh-impossible to imagine that anyone else breathes different air. Most people take personal credit for their own good luck. In their hearts, they believe it is deserved, and that the bad luck of the unfortunate person is deserved as well. This is completely natural.
Of course they live in good housing, so their property taxes support a good school district, so their kids with grow up with the same sense of entitlement. They’ll never realize how ridiculous they sound when they accuse poor people of having a sense of entitlement, either.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks….
The poor kid, not being stupid, can see that his or her future isn’t all that bright. It might occur to them that if they’d just isolate themselves from the entire society around them, and concentrate on nothing but their schoolwork, that they could rise above the whole neighborhood and become a shooting star. And suppose they do that – denying themselves friends and beer and weed and sex and all the things that (brace yourself, conservatives) high school kids of all economic classes enjoy, and in spite of all odds they achieve academically beyond anyone’s expectations.
It takes exceptional fortitude. To accomplish this feat, the poor kid had to work three times as hard, and practice that much more self-denial, as the middle-class kid (to say nothing of the rich kid). Because “talent” is basically a myth, or such a rarity that it comes down to these other things.
Glory be, they’re going to college. Their parents are so proud. And because they did well in high school, they’re getting some scholarships. But it isn’t enough, so when they graduate, they’re dragging a great big sack of student loans. But these aren’t low-rate loans. Their loan isn’t even owned by the institution they took it out from. Nope, they missed one payment and that bank immediately sold it to a holding company that handles high-risk loans, and suddenly their interest rate has doubled and they payments have tripled. And this can happen multiple times.
But hey, they’ve got that diploma, right? So they should be able to get a good job with benefits, right?
Sure, assuming they happened to have chosen a major that, four years later, turns out to still be in demand. Assuming they don’t live in Michigan or some other state that isn’t lucky enough to be doing well right now. And remember, the hiring departments of those major corporations are, in large part, still staffed by people who grew up in the suburbs. Diversity directives notwithstanding, people hire people they trust, which is to say; people who are culturally like themselves. Surprisingly, a diploma isn’t the only requirement for success.
If they perservere, and continue on a path of self-denial, in time they can grab that holy grail, that brass ring of a job with benefits. But remember, that’s a exceptional person. Maybe a Sunday magazine will do a feature article about them. And some conservative who never realized he has, since childhood, operated under basically a guarantee of success (allowing for minimal effort and barring the actual commission of a crime) will read that article and say; “See? If they apply themselves, they can get insurance!”
But increasingly, either family may be hit with illness, and the insurance company will have their infernal bean-counters in rooms without windows bring up computer screens with the insured person’s name on them, and try to find some error. Maybe they neglected to mention an emergency room visit for a toothache, back when they were teens and their parents didn’t have insurance and it looked like a crisis and they didn’t know what to do. Maybe they wrote “OK” in a box entitled “Do not write in this space”. Anyway, their policy is rescinded and in addition to being sick they must fight to make the insurance company pay what it should.
And their financial hole gets deeper. They may find themselves without the resources to fight the insurance company, which then “wins” by posting a huge profit.
There is a saying that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. There could be some truth to that. But increasingly the muggers are corporations, and they don’t make money by paying claims. Maybe a liberal is a conservative who’s been mugged by a corporation. Or cares about someone they know who has.
And that’s just a few connections. If someone thinks highly of their ability to make “good choices”, while simultaneously believing (they’d never put it this way) that they’re immune to bad luck (easy to believe that if you grew up on the right side of the tracks), it’s equally easy to blame the other guy for not being successful. And they’re disinclined to pay taxes to pave the road for the guy on the other side of the tracks if it’s obviously all their fault.
But while congratulating themselves and their fellows on their virtue, they might not consider the role of plain old luck. Because it was luck that dropped them into their family, their neighborhood, city, county, state and historic economy. Texas is rich, yes, but if they didn’t have oil? They’d be modestly well-off, provided they made judicious use of their fortunate position for transportation and the production of free-range cattle. But it would be much, much harder. But any state that thinks it is just their native pluck that makes them rich should try discounting the effect of transportation positioning and natural resources. Entire states benefit - or suffer – from their neighborhoods just like families do.
“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.”—Herman Melville
Next: “But aren’t small businesses the real engine of our economy?”