The Rugged Life and the Managerial Elites

The Rugged Life and the Managerial Elites

Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) March18, 2023

The house my wife grew up in was built in the late1800s. It stands in middle Tennessee in rural Rutherford County, 30 miles southeast of Nashville. The first time I courted Nancy at her parents’ home I was struck by its beautiful simplicity, its Gone With the Wind-style staircase, and the two red brick chimneys at each end of the structure.

            Rolling into the driveway I instantly began to compare the house to the three different tenant houses where I grew up. I began to wonder if Nancy had leveled with me when she said her family was country folks like mine. They were. I eventually learned that like my father, Nancy’s father kept their “place” clean and presentable. Rakes, hoes, and tools were in a certain location. Firewood was stacked neatly. The front porch was always swept clean. Inside, and most like my father, newspapers and Bibles would be placed here and mail would be placed there.

            But time changes almost everything. Today the Milligan place appears not so well kept. Its front yard, still beautiful and welcoming, is deceiving. The barn is caving in, and the back yard is filled with junk. The country road that the house faces takes a 90-degree turn north along the side of the house, making junk car parts, appliances, and old furniture fully visible.

            And what is the judgmental attitude that I and so many others are so wrongly prone to take when we see junk? I say we presume that junk owners have no aesthetic sense and are probably uneducated. Deplorable conditions, we assume, are caused by deplorable people.

            Not so with the current occupants of Nancy’s home place, for in the very back of the junky back yard stands a large enclosed shed filled with canned food, clothes, paper towels, diapers, and old refinished furniture. It’s all organized and is clearly no small operation. Its name is “Helping Hands.” The occupants, a retired mail carrier and his wife, built and stocked the shed in order to lend assistance to nearby needy families. The back yard is actually the prepping place for some of the items in the shed. The junk yard owners are neither junky nor needy. Nor are they deplorable.

            Today around the world there is a growing schism between working people of the middle and lower class and the professionally well established managerial elites. How did this schism ever develop in America, given the fact that our nation owes its existence to the most rugged and risk-taking people the world has ever known?  On the surface our schism appears to be one of urban and rural, but it is actually one of values and beliefs versus the outlook that allows no limit to the words nation and place. Nations are passé. The world is our oyster.

            Americans convinced their youth that they should go to college and they did. Consequently the average age of generally well-paid plumbers is 60. Economically and militarily America is still chairman of the board – for how long is a different matter – but as for “e pluribus unum” (out of many, one), we are divided. “Diversity,” which sounds so appealing, has led to the opposite of what its contenders wished, placing one’s skin color and class above one’s willingness to work and achieve. For all practical purposes Martin Luther King’s words have been abandoned.

            We’ve all heard of the “revolt of the masses” and have usually championed their aims. Today we’re experiencing the “revolt of the  elites,” meaning those whose outlook is global, whose houses and boats await them around the world, and who for the sake of profit, disdain borders as well as those who believe in borders. Formerly believers in free speech, they now label as disinformation the perspective of middle class working stiffs who disagree with them.

            As for morals there is today no shame. Only prudes care what their children see on the Super Bowl halftime show or at the elementary school’s drag queen show. As for the three philosophical pillars of modern education – Marx, Darwin, and Freud – two were atheists and one claimed theism one day and atheism the next.

            Our modern temper holds contempt for place and native homes. The ever-quotable Churchill remarked, “We shape our buildings and our buildings shape us.” Country singer Miranda Lambert sings, “The House that Built Me.”  I’d like to invite four or five of our nation’s chief globalists and political elites to take a ride with me and visit those rugged, self-dependent, selfless, junky middle class angels who occupy Nancy’s childhood home. It might convince them that such local angels, not globalists/internationalists/elitists, are the salt of the earth.