Cause and Effect

There is a wonderful remark in Downton Abbey about an aristocrat who loves dressing up in a military uniform with all the medals and ribbons and the belts and riding boots and whip, but, as the lady who tells it says, "The problem is, I don't think he connects that splendid army uniform at all to fighting."

The military, after all, fundamentally, is about killing.

I get much the same feeling whenever I hear some politician say we have to get the high school graduation rate up or we have to get the masses into college, if we are ever going to compete with Asian nations.

After all, if we could just award more sheepskins with more names on them, then the problem of a workforce which cannot add or subtract or multiply or measure would be solved.

As if putting on the cap and gown is the point, rather than what that uniform is supposed to signify: real, useful, transformative learning.

Nicholas Kristof speaking of a book by Charles Murray, about the decline of the white American middle class focuses on the statistic that in 1970 only 6% of births occurred out of wedlock among white women who had only a high school degree but now that figure is 44%.

Both Kristof and Murray bemoan the disintegration of marriage as a terrible thing, for its social consequences, namely children raised by one parent, or often by a grandparent with no parent to be seen. As if the problem is that the parents never married, rather than the problem they didn't marry had to do with the parents who were unemployed and unemployable, with no real prospects beyond, if they are lucky, driving a truck or working at McDonalds.

Kristof acknowledges the problems revealed by that statistic goes far beyond the problem of a demise of marriage. He mentions the theory that young men are civilized and tamed by women, who force them to form stable family units. As if that can really happen in the absence of good paying jobs.

Black society is very familiar with the troubles rural, under educated white men and women are now facing: where there is no prospect of steady, good money, there is social disorder, failed child rearing, crime, disease, drug abuse and general mayhem.

Of course, it will take a while for the problems of the bottom 40% to percolate up to the upper 20%. The rich are well guarded in their gated communities and their fast cars.

But someday, the restive masses may yet awaken.