My wife sent me two articles to read.  The second one contained a link to a third article that I was also compelled to read.  Ruminating on what I had read, something clicked inside of me.  A thought precipitated in my brain that really starts to explain why I am occasionally the rage monster that I am.

The first is from the New York Times called The Muggle Problem.  The gist of this article is that the pop culture that tires to make the Harry Potter universe into an allegory on modern day politics is missing a large part of the picture: the muggles.  The battle in the Potterverse is between good and bad wizards, but neither of them care about the muggles, who they all look down upon.  The wizards are elites from an elite school and the muggles are just nameless masses to them.

The second is from the blog This Appalachia Life and is titled Blessed are the White Trash.  In this one, the author states that he grew up poor in Appalachia but is now a college educated professor working on a PhD and is middle class and is compelled to explain why Appalachia is the way it is to those who just see it as trailer trash coal country.

The article linked from Blessed are the White Trash is Digging in the Trash by the author David Joy and was posted at The Bitter Southerner.  It is similar to Blessed are the White Trash but angrier.

I encourage you to read these articles, as long as they may be.  They are beautifully written.

So how do I fit into all of this?

One aspect of the culture war that often does not get discussed is credentialism.  Credentialism is the over-emphasis on certificates and degrees as evidence of an individual’s qualification to perform a certain job or attaining social status.

The author of Blessed are the White Trash gets caught in the pitfall of credentialism.  Before explaining Appalachia, he explains how he is credentialed to explain Appalachia.  He was born poor and raised in a trailer, but now he’s a burgeoning PhD and can now speak from credentials of high society.

I think it was that, most of all that struck me having just finished The Muggle Problem.

Here are my social credentials.

I was born in an upper middle class neighborhood in Miami.  My dad was a rich lawyer, my mother was a nurse.  I attended a private Montessori school until the 6th grade.  Then I went to a college preparatory academy for middle and high school.  That school cost $14,000 per year.  I then attended a private college.  The first time I attended a public school since elementary school was grad school.

Here are some important facts about the high school I attended.  Our valedictorian and my best friend, went to the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.  That is President Trump’s alma mater and he attended while Ivanka Trump was there and actually had a class with her.  He is now a Wall Street mogul.

Our salutatorian went to Yale (where Hillary Clinton went to law school).  The girls who graduated above and below me (I was 4th in my class) went to Dartmouth.  Our previous year’s valedictorian, and my next door neighbor, went  to Harvard and Harvard law, so did his older sister.

One of the kids in my class, he sat next to me in English, was the former Congressman of Florida’s 18th district, Patrick Murphy.

Another girl from my class is the up-and-coming Miami artist, Tati.

Another girl that graduated a few years ahead of me was the reality TV star and millionaire real estate agent, Katrina Campins.

Here’s the point.  I was born and raised into a class of people where I could have been a master of the universe.  I should have gone to Harvard or Yale, majored in business and finance or law and should be a hedge fund manager or counsel for the rich and famous.  It was my destiny.

I walked away from it.

Yes I went to a private college.  It was in Terre Haute, Indiana, the armpit of America.  I majored in engineering.

I moved to South Dakota.

If This Appalachia Life went from trailer to elite, I kind of went the other direction.

I didn’t end up in a trailer.  I’m by no means poor.  But I live in the “Deep South,” which is an unforgivable sin for Costal Elites.

I work in manufacturing with with people who working class, on an assembly line who come from the poor south.  I made friends in Indiana with people who grew up podunk on the edge of soybean fields.  I made friends in South Dakota with people who had cow shit on their boots, growing up in ranch land, where the once-a-month trip into town to go to the Wal-Mart was a big deal worthy of putting on the good clothes.

With the exception of my Wall Street buddy who I still talk to, I feel closer to the shit kickers and factory workers than I do the coastal elite.

These working people are more to me than maids and drivers and some demographic I can talk about in general terms at a wine tasting, I cannot condescend to them.

When I hear some Ivy League educated elitist say shit about the Midwest or Deep South it makes the rage monster inside of me seethe and want to smash things.  I have become a Midwesterner and now a Southerner.

I’ve been back to Miami and to alumni events and have heard the condescension because of the choices I made.  They condescend to me now.  I was born into the wizarding world and became a muggle.

I want to scream at the top of my lungs “I know you fuckers.  I come from your world.  You are not better than us.  You are not smarter than us.  You are not holier than us.  You sons-of-bitches think you are because you went to one of a handful of elite schools where you were told you attained status by being able to afford a diploma from there.  You bought your virtue, you didn’t earn it.  You have no right to look down upon us and make us bend at the knee before you.”

I have broken bread with the people who think they are kings and I know that they are every bit as ignorant as you can imagine but feel they are right by some divine right of Ivy League credientialism.

The more I hear the elites talk down to the people I sweat along side of, the more it makes the sans culottes blood flow in my veins.

I loathe with every cell of my body the Costal Elite bubble because I know the true, shitty, nature of the people inside of it.  I know they are not kings nor selected by god for a higher purpose.  I know they think they know better because they have been told all their lives that they are right because of the schools they attended and the circles they run in.

To them a Liberal Confirmation Bias philosophy major from Harvard knows more about the world and how to run it than a business major from the University of Alabama.  Actual, factual, knowledge be damned.  A Harvard man is never wrong.

Except they are wrong, most of the time.  Before Harvard man was minted into the elite circles, I remember him spending his summers as a clerk for his dad, drinking himself stupid every night.  Now, with a framed piece of parchment proclaiming “Veritas” in hand, he feels that he has the right to condescend to me and the people I work with because of our geographical location.

Fuck him, and all of his elite friends.

They are not kings, and I will not bow before them.