jake williams
11th January 2008, 06:35
I'm not really sure where to start, please understand that this is a tremendously difficult question to ask, intellectually and emotionally.
I have a complicated class background. I've grown up in a "liberal" university town, reasonably "leftist" relative to the rest of the country to be sure, but with the consequent wealth, and elitism. While my mother (and father, though I live with my mother and basically always have, I haven't seen my dad in years) both got degrees from that university, my mother at least didn't do too much out of it, and has worked at the same horrible retail job for half my life, making, after geared-to-income rent and phone/internet and a couple other scattered bills, student loan interest repayment, there's about $200 between us every month for almost everything else.
When I was a toddler I went to the uni daycare with students' kids. A lot of them found high-paying jobs, or it seemed more commonly, high-paying husbands, or just flat-out got money from their parents, and moved out to the burbs, the south end where the houses, while not fantatically expensive or completely isolated from the rest of the city, still does quite well for itself and is increasingly separating itself from the rest of the town, basically commuting everywhere and placing all sorts of demands on the town, the absolute right to water one's lawn, not letting apartments, even townhouses, go up because it'll "devalue property", that sort of thing.
I was still living in student housing with my mother, going to school with a couple preschool friends and the other mostly university-descendant, or Toronto-employed south end folk. I did this until I was 7, part-way through grade 2, at which point mom was done school and we moved across town , to basically the dump. I mean, not exactly hookers on street corners and bodies in dumpsters, but it's definitely the worst neighbourhood in the city, or at least near it, you knew there was a lot of crack and things around.
It was less the "danger" that bothered me, truth is their wasn't much of it, than my new classmates. I despised them, really, I hated the school and I missed my friends, and really just wanted to leave. I was extraordinarily isolated, intellectually and socially, everyone there cared about nothing more than hockey and football, and I thought they were really just ignorant and backward. This was a formative experience for me. I developed elaborate fantasies about moving back, I was perennially jealous of my best friend for everything he had, his neighbourhood and his school (formerly my school) and his friends and his toys and his computers and his every available opportunities, soccer and karate and guitar and all these things [ended up he didn't get along with Stepdad and he got sent to live with poor, trucker bio-dad in the next town over, but that's another story].
So I detested the people I lived with, basically the poor people, it turns out, though I was less economically conscious then than I am now, a lot of them, you know, industrial workers' kids. I was in a sticky place though, because I was substantially poorer than them too, I mean, that's how it seems, they got toys and clothes and I just didn't a whole lot. The issue, at the time, for me, 8, 9, 10, 11, it wasn't an economic one, it wasn't a class one, it wasn't a political one, it was, here's the [poor] dumbasses I hate, and the people I deserved to be with at the other end of town, there was really this thought that it was my place that I was deprived of. And again, these people I missed, from the first school, while they're certainly not fantastically, maniacally wealthy, they do quite well for themselves, ignorant of their socio-economic situation within the town, country and world as they are (most of them convinced of their "middle-class", even "lower-middle-class" status, this is profs' kids now, a lot of them).
Finally, my fantasies were finally fulfilled. After grade 6, when I was 12, we moved, basically back across town. Cheap housing (same house where I live now), right across from the 7/8 school, where I'd go to school with all my old "friends" (most of whom were sort-of-remembered, and who I'd occasionally seen off and on when I'd go to see Joey - and some of whom I'd barely actually met, and who I just assumed should be mine).
Which actually... while it wasn't all hopes for complicated reasons, and I was still, you know, poor, it went quite well. I was so much happier. You know, friends, not hating everyone, not getting tormented constantly by my classmates (they were so cruel, it was really horrible).
High school was, sort of an extension of the same deal. I mean, differences, and personal changes, growth I guess, but fundamentally, the class character of it for one thing, and the social situation was pretty similar. Not totally. The high school now is one of the top academic public high schools in Canada, like, top 20 I think. It's where the people in the south end suburbs send their kids, and maybe more importantly, where the profs send their kids. Literally, I'm not exaggerating, I've had classes where 6 kids have parents who teach or do research at the university.
Concentrating the vicious (though sort of unstated) elitism is the fact that, right next to ours, sort of, across a field and parking lot, a couple minutes' jog is another high school. Sort of a, mixed trade school, for people with academic difficulties, but in a lot of cases it's just the poor, non-conformist, often virulently anti-intellectual students who their local schools, or especially our school, won't accept. Sort of a cleansing, really, though no one ever, ever admits it, the Official Line is that that's a Good School for Good People who just need a different academic environment, and while I support academic options, and I despise the idea that the wealthy are Good and the poor are Bad, the truth is it's to a not insignificant extent an element of class warfare, because your chances of university are basically defunct if you go there, whereas you go to my school and you get recommendations to MIT and Berkeley and that sort of deal.
And to be entirely honest, I've picked up my side of mutual hostility between their students and ours. The important fact is that those just aren't the kind of people I like, the kind of people with whom I share interests, ideas, beliefs, I mean, style, and I won't say there isn't an intellectual gap, partly intentional and partly unintentional.
But, partly for complicated personal reasons I won't go into, partly because I've just matured, I've learned a lot about the world and my place in it, I've really grown to hate my classmates too, the people to whom one has to slowly explain that scholarships are not trivial because Canadian university is not "cheap". People to whom one has to slowly explain that if you're bringing in 6 figures, even low 6 figures, if your parents are both employed, with graduate degrees, and you have a swimming pool and you basically get whatever you want, you know, sometimes you only get the cheap laptop for Christmas... you're not "middle, lower-middle class".
I mean, I've always been basically "left", partly from elementary sanity, that there's just no way that the world economic situation in the world is morally tolerable, and I think things like gay rights, say, are just self-evident, and partly all of this is my own socioeconomic situation, and whatever I've inherited from my mother.
But it's pretty new, the extent to which I've grown to despise the other side of the coin, I guess, that I've always lived with, that while I've really sort of a repulsion for "poor" people, my mother's family, my
former classmates, and almost always have, the "rich", well-educated people just sicken me completely, their extreme ignorance and cruelty, and to such a grand extent the presumption of their own benevolence, so many of these people think themselves associated with some sort of "left" but it's just horrible.
And the option can't just be "hate everybody", and my reactions to the working class make me feel guilty, well constantly really. But it's the wealthy, educated (class terminology gets complicated because, this town is a special case with the university and all, it really does make things messy) people with whom I most closely identify, always have, who in a lot of ways I feel most comfortable with, intellectually and socially, with whom I share the same general interests. But they're just so abhorrent aside from any class solidarity reasons personally I might hold against them.
So what on earth do I do? Or think? About myself? About others? About my own emotional reactions to all of this? I'm very, very conflicted and confused and angry and alone.
Thanks.
I have a complicated class background. I've grown up in a "liberal" university town, reasonably "leftist" relative to the rest of the country to be sure, but with the consequent wealth, and elitism. While my mother (and father, though I live with my mother and basically always have, I haven't seen my dad in years) both got degrees from that university, my mother at least didn't do too much out of it, and has worked at the same horrible retail job for half my life, making, after geared-to-income rent and phone/internet and a couple other scattered bills, student loan interest repayment, there's about $200 between us every month for almost everything else.
When I was a toddler I went to the uni daycare with students' kids. A lot of them found high-paying jobs, or it seemed more commonly, high-paying husbands, or just flat-out got money from their parents, and moved out to the burbs, the south end where the houses, while not fantatically expensive or completely isolated from the rest of the city, still does quite well for itself and is increasingly separating itself from the rest of the town, basically commuting everywhere and placing all sorts of demands on the town, the absolute right to water one's lawn, not letting apartments, even townhouses, go up because it'll "devalue property", that sort of thing.
I was still living in student housing with my mother, going to school with a couple preschool friends and the other mostly university-descendant, or Toronto-employed south end folk. I did this until I was 7, part-way through grade 2, at which point mom was done school and we moved across town , to basically the dump. I mean, not exactly hookers on street corners and bodies in dumpsters, but it's definitely the worst neighbourhood in the city, or at least near it, you knew there was a lot of crack and things around.
It was less the "danger" that bothered me, truth is their wasn't much of it, than my new classmates. I despised them, really, I hated the school and I missed my friends, and really just wanted to leave. I was extraordinarily isolated, intellectually and socially, everyone there cared about nothing more than hockey and football, and I thought they were really just ignorant and backward. This was a formative experience for me. I developed elaborate fantasies about moving back, I was perennially jealous of my best friend for everything he had, his neighbourhood and his school (formerly my school) and his friends and his toys and his computers and his every available opportunities, soccer and karate and guitar and all these things [ended up he didn't get along with Stepdad and he got sent to live with poor, trucker bio-dad in the next town over, but that's another story].
So I detested the people I lived with, basically the poor people, it turns out, though I was less economically conscious then than I am now, a lot of them, you know, industrial workers' kids. I was in a sticky place though, because I was substantially poorer than them too, I mean, that's how it seems, they got toys and clothes and I just didn't a whole lot. The issue, at the time, for me, 8, 9, 10, 11, it wasn't an economic one, it wasn't a class one, it wasn't a political one, it was, here's the [poor] dumbasses I hate, and the people I deserved to be with at the other end of town, there was really this thought that it was my place that I was deprived of. And again, these people I missed, from the first school, while they're certainly not fantastically, maniacally wealthy, they do quite well for themselves, ignorant of their socio-economic situation within the town, country and world as they are (most of them convinced of their "middle-class", even "lower-middle-class" status, this is profs' kids now, a lot of them).
Finally, my fantasies were finally fulfilled. After grade 6, when I was 12, we moved, basically back across town. Cheap housing (same house where I live now), right across from the 7/8 school, where I'd go to school with all my old "friends" (most of whom were sort-of-remembered, and who I'd occasionally seen off and on when I'd go to see Joey - and some of whom I'd barely actually met, and who I just assumed should be mine).
Which actually... while it wasn't all hopes for complicated reasons, and I was still, you know, poor, it went quite well. I was so much happier. You know, friends, not hating everyone, not getting tormented constantly by my classmates (they were so cruel, it was really horrible).
High school was, sort of an extension of the same deal. I mean, differences, and personal changes, growth I guess, but fundamentally, the class character of it for one thing, and the social situation was pretty similar. Not totally. The high school now is one of the top academic public high schools in Canada, like, top 20 I think. It's where the people in the south end suburbs send their kids, and maybe more importantly, where the profs send their kids. Literally, I'm not exaggerating, I've had classes where 6 kids have parents who teach or do research at the university.
Concentrating the vicious (though sort of unstated) elitism is the fact that, right next to ours, sort of, across a field and parking lot, a couple minutes' jog is another high school. Sort of a, mixed trade school, for people with academic difficulties, but in a lot of cases it's just the poor, non-conformist, often virulently anti-intellectual students who their local schools, or especially our school, won't accept. Sort of a cleansing, really, though no one ever, ever admits it, the Official Line is that that's a Good School for Good People who just need a different academic environment, and while I support academic options, and I despise the idea that the wealthy are Good and the poor are Bad, the truth is it's to a not insignificant extent an element of class warfare, because your chances of university are basically defunct if you go there, whereas you go to my school and you get recommendations to MIT and Berkeley and that sort of deal.
And to be entirely honest, I've picked up my side of mutual hostility between their students and ours. The important fact is that those just aren't the kind of people I like, the kind of people with whom I share interests, ideas, beliefs, I mean, style, and I won't say there isn't an intellectual gap, partly intentional and partly unintentional.
But, partly for complicated personal reasons I won't go into, partly because I've just matured, I've learned a lot about the world and my place in it, I've really grown to hate my classmates too, the people to whom one has to slowly explain that scholarships are not trivial because Canadian university is not "cheap". People to whom one has to slowly explain that if you're bringing in 6 figures, even low 6 figures, if your parents are both employed, with graduate degrees, and you have a swimming pool and you basically get whatever you want, you know, sometimes you only get the cheap laptop for Christmas... you're not "middle, lower-middle class".
I mean, I've always been basically "left", partly from elementary sanity, that there's just no way that the world economic situation in the world is morally tolerable, and I think things like gay rights, say, are just self-evident, and partly all of this is my own socioeconomic situation, and whatever I've inherited from my mother.
But it's pretty new, the extent to which I've grown to despise the other side of the coin, I guess, that I've always lived with, that while I've really sort of a repulsion for "poor" people, my mother's family, my
former classmates, and almost always have, the "rich", well-educated people just sicken me completely, their extreme ignorance and cruelty, and to such a grand extent the presumption of their own benevolence, so many of these people think themselves associated with some sort of "left" but it's just horrible.
And the option can't just be "hate everybody", and my reactions to the working class make me feel guilty, well constantly really. But it's the wealthy, educated (class terminology gets complicated because, this town is a special case with the university and all, it really does make things messy) people with whom I most closely identify, always have, who in a lot of ways I feel most comfortable with, intellectually and socially, with whom I share the same general interests. But they're just so abhorrent aside from any class solidarity reasons personally I might hold against them.
So what on earth do I do? Or think? About myself? About others? About my own emotional reactions to all of this? I'm very, very conflicted and confused and angry and alone.
Thanks.