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The immorality of the "in" crowd
I’m a white guy who went to a private Jesuit-run prep school and then to an Ivy League college. At the prep school, an “in” crowd, mostly the sons of the city’s business and social elite, controlled the social pecking order, played on the sports teams, hosted exclusive parties, and bragged about their sexual conquests. And there were the nerds, like me, who had no part in any of that.
The “ins” knew that when they went too far, their parents would smooth it all over with a boys-will-be-boys defense. If you were, like me, in those classrooms on an academic scholarship and were the son of a less than elite family, you had no illusions that bad behavior would be dismissed. Of course we nerds weren’t perfect, but at least we had to live in a world of consequences for bad behavior, and we learned from that.
By and large, the in crowd at America’s elite prep schools go on to join the elite fraternities and clubs of the Ivy League and other high-end universities. They then head for top jobs in business and government, too many of them still absent any cognizance of what it means to be a decent human being. The world is theirs for the taking and their assumption is that only a fool would not walk through the doors to power that are open to them.
I think now that many of them were failed by parents who raised them to have such massive blind spots, parents who were operating within a cultural system of patriarchy and privilege that has little if any interest in the common good....
The “ins” knew that when they went too far, their parents would smooth it all over with a boys-will-be-boys defense. If you were, like me, in those classrooms on an academic scholarship and were the son of a less than elite family, you had no illusions that bad behavior would be dismissed. Of course we nerds weren’t perfect, but at least we had to live in a world of consequences for bad behavior, and we learned from that.
By and large, the in crowd at America’s elite prep schools go on to join the elite fraternities and clubs of the Ivy League and other high-end universities. They then head for top jobs in business and government, too many of them still absent any cognizance of what it means to be a decent human being. The world is theirs for the taking and their assumption is that only a fool would not walk through the doors to power that are open to them.
I think now that many of them were failed by parents who raised them to have such massive blind spots, parents who were operating within a cultural system of patriarchy and privilege that has little if any interest in the common good....
https://www.johngraham.org/blog/the-kavanaugh-hearings#.W60IHe9tQQI.facebook
