rumiNATION

This topic has come up a couple times in the past few days. So I now present you with a little essay that I will title:

The Elimination of the Middle Class.

It used to be that there were distinct working classes in this country.

As always, you had your poor. Either poor because they aren't working at all - perhaps due to some sort of medical concern, perhaps due to laziness, perhaps due to some other unnamed variable. Or maybe they are working and just not making enough money to support the life or family they've got. The poor have always existed and will always exist as long as we live in a broken world. I'm pretty sure it's an inevitability.

Moving on from there, you had the middle class. These were the people who finished high school and maybe either went directly into the military or took up a trade or settled on some kind of boring, workaday factory job. Not illustrious by any stretch of the imagination, but functional. They had a car to drive, food on the table and a decent little house in the suburbs where they lived with their wife, 2.5 children and the family dog.

Then you had the upper class. The white collars. People who either by hard work (and higher education) or by the good grace of being born into a wealthy family lived very comfortably. They drove cars that were shinier, newer and bigger. They lived in houses that were more expansive, more nicely appointed. They were doctors, lawyers, politicians, professors. You know, things like that.

Our country maintained homeostasis. There were people to do all the jobs that needed doing and, for the most part, people were accepting (if not appreciative) of their place in the food chain.

Fast forward until present times, though, and you see a different picture. Now we tell our kids that if they don't go to college, they're never going to be worth anything. You need a degree to be a secretary or fix a car engine. Service jobs are the kinds of things that only the stupid people or illegal immigrants are good for.

Is it any wonder that so many companies outsource their factory work to other countries now? Sure, the labor is cheaper there, but they also have to deal with a country full of Americans who believe that they're too good to do menial tasks.

Am I against higher education? Not at all. Am I against higher education for the sake of higher education? Absolutely. If you have a goal in mind - maybe you want to be a doctor, or a chemist, or a professor - then by all means, learn away. Rack up a considerable amount of debt, but then get a job where you can pay that debt off. But this whole deal where kids go to college to figure out what they want to do with their lives? Rubbish. Either you know or you don't. So maybe you get a job pushing a broom for a year or two and in that time you have an epiphany and realize you were meant to be a dentist. Then you go to school with a goal in mind and some money in your pocket. Or maybe, just maybe, you discover that you're okay with pushing a broom. Maybe you find that you make enough money to live comfortably within your means and when you leave work for the day - you LEAVE work for the day. That doesn't make you stupid. That doesn't make you an underachiever. It makes you the same kind of average Joe that our country used to be filled with before we started becoming so full of our own virtue.