Classism Revisited

“You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content."
― C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian

I've been lurking and occasionally posting on the Cruise Critic message boards, trying to learn more about Cunard since we've never sailed with them before. As I understand it, the style is very British, even to the point of having segregated classes of travel.

Craig & Vicki

According to our old tablemates from our 2018 WC, Craig and Vicki who were once bumped up to a Grills suite on Cunard, passengers in Princess or Queens Grill accommodations can avoid mingling with the hoi polloi  entirely if they wish. (Think Titanic...no wait. Not a good pre-cruise thought!)

One poster on a Cunard thread said something about how certain types of people regard others. It went sort of like this:

"Americans respect wealth. Brits respect class. Europeans bow to education..." 

I was struck by that observation. And I'm wishing it not to be true.

First, that most vile and taboo of subjects--money. Yes, Americans are driven. We do like to make money. We like to spend it. And we like to give it to others. I'm grateful to be able to do so. We've worked hard, but we've also been blessed. It is a gift to be able to bless others with a job or a donation.

But I don't look at other people and base my esteem of them on how much I think they have in the bank. That's the worst sort of shallowness.

Second, class distinctions. Since the US has never had a monarchy, we don't have a hereditary class system. True, some are born with more opportunities, some with more talent or innate intellect than others, but no one is touted as nobility simply because of an accident of birth. I guess you might equate our mania for celebrities or sports stars as a type of classism, and our politicians definitely consider themselves the ruling class, but as my dad says, "We all put our pants on one leg at a time."

Besides, using  the idea of class to separate from others rubs me wrong. I've always thought the person with real class is the one who makes everyone around them feel comfortable and welcome.

And then there's education...I'm all for it. To my mind, it's a great equalizer. An education is the surest way to lift oneself out of poverty. But I must confess I have run into educational snobbery. Once at a writers' conference, another attendee was waxing poetic about her cum laude degree from her alma mater, Brown University.  

Then she turned to me and asked where I'd gone to school. 

"University of Northern Iowa."  I neglected to add that I'd graduated summa cum laude AND without any debt because I'd worked my way through my degree. (At the risk of sounding smug, I think that omission was kinda classy of me!)       

Anyway, she blinked twice, and grandly announced, "Never heard of it!"

I had no response. My folks always taught me if you can't say anything nice, you shouldn't say anything at all. But I was thinking furiously. After all, of the two of us, I was the only writer whose work had been published by multiple NY houses. 

Frankly, the dirty little secret about education is that one university is very like another in respect to coursework. The idea that an Ivy League degree results in a better education is bogus. My DH finished his career with Google and was the only one of Google's thousands of employees to graduate with a Math degree from UNI. He held his own with the MIT and Stanford grads just fine. When he later took some courses at Harvard, he expected them to be tougher, but he aced them all handily.

The difference in universities, I'm sorry to admit, is in networking, which amounts to a type of classism. Heavy sigh...

Then there was another poster on the Cunard boards who were worried about whether they should even eat in the Main Dining Room because they had never gone to college. They were afraid they wouldn't be interesting to better educated travelers. 

Oh, for the love! There are some folks with multiple higher degrees who don't have the sense God gave a goose. And people who never graduated from high school who are well-read, well-spoken and know how to treat others. While education is valuable, it doesn't determine who you are or what you're worth! Comparing ourselves to others is the way of death.

Life comes from idea behind the quote  with which I started this post. If we could all see the image of God stamped on each other's features, there'd be no silliness over who's one up on  the other.