Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Is this a revolt against education?

I have a suspicion that the underlying phenomenon driving the conditions of this election cycle is the anger of the uneducated (and the marginally educated) against the stranglehold that they see the college-educated people as seeming to have on everything.

This stranglehold is mostly illusion.  There are vast numbers of people like Trump himself that have attended degree factories, who have gone on to terrorize their city councils, their boards of educations, their County governments and their chambers of commerce, and possibly their Lion's Clubs and their Rotary Clubs.  None of these institutions require very much education to take over.  Many of them are run by perfectly well-educated guys, but not all of them.

Perhaps working-class whites are sick and tired of being given the runaround by (ostensibly college-educated) minor bureaucrats at various levels of government.  They must hate the fact that in order to put in a huge new restaurant on a piece of land that they bullied somebody out of, they must make sure that they are not in a flood plane, that they're not going to adversely influence the water flow through the ground, and the runoff during a rainstorm, blah blah, blah blah.  Who gives a ^%$# about runoff, anyway?  There you go.  You gotta go to school to understand what that is, and why it is important.

Trump types (we've got to come up with a name for them) probably look at Hillary C, and shudder.  There's a ton of paperwork waiting to be created, they're probably thinking.  They really, really want the olden days back, when you could make a buck for a few years, before someone realizes that you're serving crap in your new restaurant.  All the lessons they have learned, about making a fast buck, all for nothing.

I have learned a great deal about how an honest County government saves foolish citizens from themselves.  It's like the people say about Obamacare: PLEASE allow me to get sick.  I don't need insurance, never did, never will.  The miserable fact is that the number of those who do need medical insurance are difficult to predict.

Actually, they're not that difficult.  If the insurance companies knew * who drank to excess, * who smoked in excess, * who had a unhealthy body weight, etc, they could easily set differential premiums for people based on their lifestyles.  But you can easily imagine that Congress would disallow that practice, just as it has declared that different car insurance rates should not be allowed for guys and girls, despite the fact that girls are evidently much safer drivers.  I do not know the details, but under pressure from consumers, Congress tends to prefer equal rates for everyone.  (Perhaps it is set state by state.  I don't know.  But it is very, very bad.  It is terrible.  It is rigged.  You know something?)

The word ignorance has many meanings.

* Someone who does not know how things work, and why things are done.
* Someone who does not know how to behave in complex situations.
* Someone who does not know the reasons why certain rules and laws exist.
* Someone who does not know the benefits of having certain members of society.
* Someone who does not know how to respond to a statement that makes them mad.
* Someone who does not know how to show a little class.
* Someone who does not know how to bring up their kids to be decent human beings.
* Someone who thinks that it is nobody's business how their kids behave.

I can't pretend that a few years in college can rectify seventeen years of parental neglect; in fact, I know that they cannot.  On the other hand, I do know some classy kids who transcend the limitations of their subhuman parents, and I can only marvel.  But there is a lot more good in the world than the ignorant can recognize, and there's nothing we can do about it.

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