hard question wrt myself

[kaysixteen]

Now here is the other issue-- progressives and centrists like myself, esp those of us who are indeed very highly educated have generally had a hard time accepting 1) that everyone else does not have the knowledge base, and often also the brainpower, that we have, and 2) that many of us do more or less look down on those knuckle-walking mouthbreather rejects from Deliverance, but it is also true that those people, whilst rightly complaining when they are looked down upon by the denizens of the Faculty Club, nonetheless, well, these folks also look down on people like us.  Really, they do, and they are largely allowed to get away with this.  I have not been in k12 pub school for 40 years, but still recognize that, well, lots of my classmates picked on me for, well, being me, being the best student in the class from the day I arrived in town, for obviously liking school and education, etc.   And I am now realizing that this longstanding background is indeed negatively influencing the way I look at people like this today, esp since these anti-intellectual, anti-education, anti-expertise views amongst these sorts of people have been growing much more strongly in recent years (it seems quaint to recall that until fairly recently it was a thing of pride for many undereducated working class Americans to scrimp and save, work three jobs, etc, in order to send their kids to college). I do not like these things, all of them, but they are what they are, and I need to watch myself to think with facts, and not emotions... and indeed, sometimes those facts are very bad.

While I think on it, let me ask the Canadians here if there are similar education-based divisions existing or developing north of the border?

[Wahoo Redux]

I don't think there is anything particularly unusual about your throughts here, K16.  Riots between townspeople and the students at Medieval Oxford were big news in the day, forcing the king to send troops to the city.  There's always been resentment between "educated adults," "city slickers" and the people who work a trade or labor for a living.

I can remember in high school when Mr. Monsoon asked Charles Chang (not real names) in class what a "microcosm" was and the overt anger and eyerolling on Billy V's face when Charles answered----not only was Charles a brain, but he was Asian, a double-whammy where I came from.  I knew what a microcosm was too, but I was safe since I was white and a mediocre student in high school.  Charles went on to an Ivy League college but then did not do a lot with his degree; he does occasionally return to our hometown to play Dungeons and Dragons with his old nerd pals.

Point being that this divide between the highly educated people and the folks who drop out or merely graduate high school has always been pronounced.  My sister, who grew up in the same household as I did but barely finished high school and then dropped out of community college, started calling me "elitist" whenever I'd go home to visit from grad school.  Literally, "That's really elitist, Wahoo" whenever I mentioned things like dreading the block party or not liking the movie Titanic----she was very offended that I thought the movie and the song at the end were silly.  She had married into and then divorced out of a blue collar family, and even though she wanted her kids to go to college, she became very suspicious and very defensive about all sorts of stuff.  Her in-laws were very uncomfortable around my family and were very quick to take offense.

I think this is, in part, what is fueling the Trumpee odyssey currently underway----and it is hard not to get frustrated with the folks who take their socioeconomic resentments to the voting booth.  I suspect these will be the people who will suffer the most if the worst Trumpee missteps come true.