Bob Thomas Writes

With All Due Respect
By Fred Reed

I sometimes think the country is being divided into two groups. The first, and much smaller, is those who read widely and know much, who are refined and live in a wider world than the merely present.

The second is those who received high grades without understanding that they were being cheated by their elders. The two will be forever kept apart.

The succession of cultivation, once broken, is not easily rejoined, and it seems We are doing everything we can to break it. It is a shame. Our young people deserve more from us as adults. We are, after all, the caretakers of their future. We are doing this, as far as I can tell, so that the apathetic and uninterested will feel good about themselves. We are doing it to conceal that some of us are better than others.

Yes. Better. That word.

In the past it was recognized that certain qualities were superior to others, and that people who cultivated those qualities were superior to those who didn’t. The honest were thought superior to the thieving, the kind to the cruel, the provident to the shiftless, the wise to the foolish,
Today holding these views constitute the crime of elitism, which is the recognition that the better is preferable to the worse. One must never, ever notice that some people are better than others.

Not to notice the inescapable requires either stupidity or moral blindness. Since few people are very stupid, it must be a conscious decision to be blind to the inequities of some people. We feign blindness for reasons of politics or political correctness. We pretend that the world does not have people who are a burden on society by nature of their shiftless, lazy, neglectful ways.

It takes some serious feigning. If I said that a white suburban kid who couldn’t do long division, amounted to a medieval peasant without the excuses of living in a medieval century, I would be called, spare me, and elitist.

Which I am.

What, pray, should one feel toward intelligent people who cannot read without laboriously sounding out the syllables, who know less of their language than a fourth-grader in 1954, have a shaky grasp of the multiplication tables, cannot write a coherent paragraph, and seldom read a book? Respect comes to people who merit respect. It isn’t an entitlement. Contempt also comes to those who merit it. And should.

I do not scorn savages from the darkest jungles, who eat grubs from a log, and consider the internal combustion engine some form of God. It is unreasonable to blame them for not having profited from opportunities they didn’t have, I watch them with wonder, but not contempt.
But the lazy, shiftless, deliberately half-lettered, the feckless and socially worthless–yes, worthless: that, and “shiftless”, are words that could well be resurrected–those who have had every opportunity to better themselves but couldn’t summon the effort nor energy. . .for them I cannot help feeling pity. And contempt.

And what should one think of the obese welfare mother with a second-grade education and a litter of five, from five different fathers, she can’t feed and won’t school, who spends her limited time between chid births watching Oprah and feeling abused? The best I can come up with is revulsion. And pity, yes. Being a baby making machine cannot be pleasant. Yet I will not pretend that it is admirable.

And what of the mall children of the suburbs, who leave high school with less arithmetical fluency than my generation had in the fifth grade in 1955? I didn’t know arithmetic because I was particularly meritorious. I was a barefoot Southern kid more interested in Baseball and BB guns. I knew arithmetic, we all knew arithmetic, because society, the schools, and our parents made it plain that we ought to know it, and in fact were going to know it, at which point the conversation was over.

As the culture dies, the schools fail, the cities teem with functional illiterates and our children turn into tattooed, baggy pants’d primitives overindulged by a civilization whose origins they barley know, I watch them with. . . I will say it plainly. . . contempt. Sadness also, for they have lost much, but yes, a contempt I do not want, yet cannot escape.

So do many people old enough to read and write fluently. None use the word “contempt”. The unspoken laws protecting everyone’s self esteem are to punitively policed. Again, it is not a contempt that people want to feel: All would prefer that things not be as they are. Yet contempt is unmistakably what shows through their looks and glances and whispered words.

A greater question: What should one feel other than contempt for a society that, enjoying virtually unlimited resources, deliberately ‘en-stupidates’ its children? We don’t have to do it. We choose to. We are ruining our society on purpose by accepting less from our educators, but also by demanding less of ourselves as parents. We accept because it’s easier than confronting. We accept because we’ve already given up too much adult responsibility to our children. It’s easier to be their friend than their parent.

Today I see mall rats who go through high school with the red puffy eyes born of dope, and have to literally count on their fingers to do multiplication. On graduation they take one course at the community college, play video games, and hang out pointlessly with their friends. We all see them every day. Sweeping floors and wearing paper hats. Unable to give us change if the register doesn’t tell them the ‘how much’. I’ve got more respect for dirt. You can grow plants in it.

Those who achieve will always look down on those who didn’t bother. As the gap increases between the few who know their history and literature, and those who mumble ungrammatically about their favorite TV reality show, the contempt will become sharper. Two cultures.

Maybe self-esteem comes too high. Besides, who will have greater respect for themselves, the puzzled and half-literate, or those who read confidently and know that the have been well educated? If you want to respect yourself, do something worthy of respect. Now there’s a concept.

In the meantime take a look, a hard look, at your child. Do you see a corporate employee in a suit, or a paper hat?

By Fred Reed – www.FredonEverything.com