Confessions of an Elitist

I have learned that I am an elitist.

I have read, numerous times, that I am part of the ‘educated elite.’ I ended up being an elitist because I have advanced degrees, both a Master’s degree and a Doctorate.

I have read that I am part of the ‘northeastern elite’ because I was born and raised in the northeast. My New Jersey roots have come back to haunt me.

I think it might be time for the word ‘elite’ to find its way into the hopper. It is being way over-used and it’s being over-used in some majorly unhealthy ways.

First, speaking about the ‘educated elite.’

This makes education sound like a bad thing and woe to us when education is seen as a bad thing. Woe to us big time.

In diminishing education as the domain of the ‘elite’ we are saying to science that scientific thought is less important than it used to be. It is saying that when science discovers things we do not like or wish that science hadn’t discovered these things, then we are moving down a dangerous path. When we say that we do not like history as it reads, so we are going to make some ‘adjustments’ to the story, then we are not acknowledging reality.

I have grown weary of scientific thought rejected because it does not match people’s interpretation of the Bible. Often the science is correct and it’s the Biblical interpretation that is off. If education helps people come to a more correct answer than a desired answer, so be it. Simply calling people ‘elite’ because they bothered to actually read founding documents in their totality instead of picking and choosing lines; or people who have studied the Bible in its totality and its context and dismissing them a liberal elitists because they did hard work is bogus.

Education is not elitism. Most people who have earned doctorate degrees will make the same confession that I am going to make. A doctorate degree does not make you elite and it does not necessarily signify that you are smarter than everyone else. (Though you may be more educated which is different from smarter!)

It does demonstrate, however, determination to do the work that was required. Doctorate degrees are not sprints----they are marathons. It is a difficult and grueling process that is achieved not be being elite or even smarter than anyone else. It’s achieved by determination more than anything else.

The fact that I did this does not make me a elite. I am not part of the educated elite; I am part of those who are educated and that is all.

Then there is the northeast. The northeast is largely Democratic these days and people make some really interesting presumptions about the northeast. Elitists. Hah!

My Dad repaired televisions for most of his career. He graduated from a vocational high school and went to radio school and learned to repair televisions in the days of tubes. Later in his career he became a field supervisor at General Electric product services where he oversaw other repair people. It was his only white collar job and he was so incredibly proud of that achievement.

My Mom was a stay at home Mom for a long time and then worked in offices as a typist. Her secretarial skills were limited to typing----on typewriters.

I grew up with my brother and sister in a modest home. We delivered newspapers and got other jobs. I worked for two years unloading grocery trucks and pushing shopping carts at a grocery store. My parents, neither of whom had education beyond high school demanded we all go to college. And we did. On all sides of the family, my generation was the first generation to attend college.

We were a blue collar family in a world that had white collar people and blue collar people. Many people belonged to unions and many people did not.

In that world it was interesting. The blue collar world was largely Roman Catholic; the white collar world was largely mainline Protestant. It was the mainline Protestant congregations that were more educated and were mostly Republican. The people raised Roman Catholic were mostly Democrats. If you called most of the blue collared, Roman Catholic Democrats liberal, they’d laugh in your face and you’d deserve it.

As the Republican Party grew more and more in the Evangelical movement, the mainline Protestant people moved over to the Democrats. The largely blue collared, Roman Catholic Democrats look at people from the Religious Right like they are from another planet.

The northeast has a diverse, highly concentrated population. Because people all live on top of each other, and because the region has always been ethnically incredibly diverse, it is a region that is, out of necessity, highly tolerant.

What is often perceived of as ‘liberal elitism’ is really just a natural tolerance for diversity and largely Democratic. It has never really been as ‘liberal’ as people like to believe it is and if you called people who grew up in the many blue collared regions that permeate most of the northeast ‘elite’ it would be the funniest thing they have ever heard.

My elitism confession is this. I have never been an elitist. The only people who have presumed this so are too willingly ignorant to recognize this.

My thought, more and more is that the word ‘elite’ is a word that needs to find a nice place to rest until people learn what it actually means.