In reply to Edward Stille’s New York Times editorial I wrote, “as long as everyone has a chance to compete,” is the key phrase in this editorial. We can pretend all we want to that everyone does have a chance to compete, but the inequality of our condition makes that all but impossible. With our elites increasingly unwilling to support public education, Pell Grants, and job training programs for the unemployed, even worse, demanding school vouchers, so that property taxes subsidize private education for their kids, rather than supporting the poor kid whose parents can’t afford it (even with the voucher,) we move ever further away from the egalitarian ideal.
I would add that there is an enemy out there and they are at war with the rest of us, the 99% of us who are not millionaires. Though there is nothing exceptional about them, and many of them have a difficult time even holding down a job, they do “come from people who accomplished things in life,” as one of them put it to me at one time, clearly assuming that I hadn’t (he was trying to tell I wasn’t worthy of the woman I was seeing.) Their ancestry makes them superior and therefore entitled to wealth and power. Such people are beyond boorish, yet we permit them lord it over us, envy their ability to arrogate position and power to themselves, and aspire to acceptance in their society. I long ago decided it wasn’t worth it to be an outsider looking in. I’d far rather turn my back on such people, and let them be the insiders looking out… below.