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Portrait of "Cosette" by Emile Bayard, in "Les Misérables"
Americans don't acknowledge social class differences. To do so violates, it seems, the psychological principle of "all people are created equal."
So, David Brooks' brilliant column—"The Wrong Inequality"—is especially interesting. Brooks identifies two types of inequality—blue state and red state. "Blue State Inequality" is about the upper one percent who earn many multiples of what "normal," average Americans do. But Brooks is especially interested in "Red State Inequality"—for Brooks, "Red Inequality is much more important."
"Today, college grads are much less likely to smoke than high school grads, they are less likely to be obese, they are more likely to be active in their communities, they have much more social trust, they speak many more words to their children at home.
Some research suggests that college grads have much bigger friendship networks than high school grads. The social divide is even starker than the income divide.
. . . Today, college grads are much more likely to get married, they are much less likely to get divorced and they are much, much less likely to have a child out of wedlock."
Less well-educated people live in different universes—universes unacknowledged by PT blogs, perhaps, but by the media, America, and the universe at large. They barely make contact with the larger world—with the successes, aspirations, hopes that college-educated people's children have:
[C]ollege graduates have become good at passing down advantages to their children. If you are born with parents who are college graduates, your odds of getting through college are excellent. If you are born to high school grads, your odds are terrible.
An old protest song intones: "If you're white, you're all right. . . .if you're black, get back." But now, lower-social-class people—you know, the ones who don't exist—are the invisible people for whom the American dream doesn't apply.
But who cares about them? They don't even go to college, and thus can't end up complaining about unaffordable student debt—like those involved with Occupy Wall Street.
There's another world out there—kind of like the underworld in Brecht and Weil's "Threepenny Opera," or Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," or Dickens' "Oliver Twist," or Hugo's "Les Misérables." But we in America don't see this world. They just don't count.
Hey, wasn't Les Misérables a great show? And that little girl—beautiful, wasn't she? She certainly wasn't obese!
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