Category Archives: Life reflections

Elites

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I broke my own self-rule about arguing Facebook the other day. A bunch of Alphas were saying if the electoral college were abolished, we wouldn’t have had an insurrection.

Even while suggesting that this was in error for two reasons, and that DC urbanites do not understand rural mindsets—immediate personal anger reactions to that were intriguing—I knew this was on their turf, inside a pack of people who need each other in their careers. It was the kind of place where you’re talking to one person, and 12 others jump in from the sidelines, like the drunk guest behind the couch who suddenly rises mid-heartfelt speech on social justice and says, “Shut up, I gotta piss!”

My friend calls Internet research “academic trolling;” lobbing a post and watching reactions to see how long it takes to turn to an inevitable conclusion: blame the victim, or hit a conspiracy theory (and that these exist on the Liberal side is REALLLLLLY hard to explain to lefties). We co-authors of the conspiracy theory book are madly capturing screen shots and threads from false flaggers, slow-waking evangelicals realizing they’ve been had, and elitists.

In that vein, several Alphas couldn’t believe that rural and urban voters have different motivations. It will be easier to reproduce one comment here than paraphrase: When my team drafted the Maryland Democratic Party 2020 Platform, we engaged people on the Shore and Western Maryland to find out what’s important in their communities: healthcare, infrastructure improvements, jobs, schools, and protecting the environment. They also want us to protect family farms from encroachment by agribusiness. Putting it simply, their real wants and needs are pretty nearly the same as everyone’s. The methods to meet their needs differ from urban areas, but not their needs. So thinking they need also to have disproportionate political power through a Byzantine electoral college is in error.

Yeah…. How can we put this? What are the different ways in which those words would be defined in a rural versus urban environment—leaving aside the charm of being engaged, rather than represented on the team in the first place? Especially when “everyone’s” is casually used to mean “people like us.”

Ethnocentrism (the assumption that others want to be like us because we are the best way to be) is rampant in many places in America these days. The domestic terrorists and rioters are inexcusable. Equally inexcusable is to dismiss the people who did not riot, who still want what they were lied to about getting with the dangerous madman we elected: to be heard. They backed the wrong horse, but to call them names and dismiss them as morally (and intellectually) inferior is dangerous.

Class is the last place in America where we don’t have to examine our condescension. That is also dangerous. We got a lot of good info from the conversation. (Permit me one personal indulgence comment? Some real Alpha gem mansplainers live in brownstones.)

Wealthy, educated Alphas living large online must by our very existence be part of the solution, not the problem; it is unfortunate that we dismiss opportunities to examine ourselves as otherwise. We will keep telling ourselves we’re right, right up to the moment that people ignored and denigrated by this dismissal set our world ablaze. There’s a reason the false conspiracy theory Q astroturfers keep using the word “Elites.” They know their audience. They listened to them, the better to manipulate them, sadly. But they listened to them.

I wish we knew ourselves half so well. And I wish we were better listeners. This is going to go badly.

Ode to Joy – or Despair

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Jack makes it over the line with time to spare for a change – –

Although I’m not directly affected very much by Brexit it saddens me to see Scotland dragged out of the EU against the will of nearly seventy percent of her population. What’s particularly annoying is that Northern Ireland (part of the UK) has been granted special status as a ‘semi-member’, continuing in the customs and trading rules of the EU, while Scotland has been denied that. One result is that young people will no longer be able to study in Europe under the ‘Erasmus’ scheme.

Back in the 1990s when I was a Head of Department in a Scottish community college, I managed three environmental education projects funded by the EU through an initiative called ADAPT. As part of that focus I set up student exchange schemes with a college in Denmark and another in Slovakia. My college was in an ex-coalmining area and most of my students had very narrow horizons. They had very limited interest in the wider world and low expectations of their likely success in being chosen to participate. In fact, out of a student population of around four hundred each year I had to twist arms to get fifteen applicants. This despite the fact that there was no cost to them.

What made me persevere, though, was that I had already been touring around Europe with my folk band and wanted my students to have a similar experience – I wanted them to feel ‘European’ and meet young people like themselves who might speak a different language and eat different food, but had much the same outlook on life, It turned out that it actually was the language and food that most scared my students. Of course most of them had never been abroad before except maybe a family vacation in Spain where everyone would speak English and they’d get fish n’ chips.

The other reason I kept at it was that from the very beginning the returning groups were completely transformed by the experience. Many of them kept in touch with the friends they made and when the reciprocal visits took place with young Danes and Slovaks coming to Scotland these ties were reinforced.

To get the funding for these exchanges I had to show that the purpose was both educational and not covering part of the regular curriculum, so the focus was on environmental issues which were just becoming a ‘hot topic’ at the time. The idea was that when they finished their studies and went into employment they would have the knowledge and enthusiasm to affect policy in their places of work.

None of this would have been possible without the support of the EU and that has now gone for students from England, Scotland and Wales. The good news is that young people from Northern Ireland will be able to continue in the Erasmus program, but that just makes me more frustrated. Scotland can’t because we were dragged out of the EU alongside England and Wales—and against our majority will.