Good Morning.
It appears that we've come down to two basic concepts about life in America. The first believes the United States was meant to be the great experiment in democracy with representatives elected from a population that came from anywhere and everywhere. The second clings to the idea that the first people who arrived were from Europe, preferably the northern part, and that they are the true Americans. Some of them built the cities on the east coast while others climbed into odd-looking wagons with rounded canvas tops and headed west to settle towns and tame the land. The really adventurous pushed on to the Pacific and got things up and running there; people were supposed to come to this country only by way of the Atlantic, and there were raised eyebrows about even some of them. Whoever they were, they founded schools and colleges and universities pretty quickly - one-room frame structures and brick and mortar halls of ivy that didn't manage to erase the kind of ignorance that has nothing to do with spelling bees, encyclopedias, or advanced degrees, the kind that is passed on from generation to generation as surely as blue eyes, flat feet, and a predisposition toward certain illnesses.
A lack of enlightenment is different from the ignorance that keeps the great majority of us from ever qualifying for Jeopardy, and it shows up in people with a variety of intelligence quotients because it's learned at home. Kids are taught how to lace a shoe, throw a football, or make a pie crust, and they may even learn how to play tournament level Scrabble or chess, but they also get wind of family attitudes - some call them values - through comments or a well-placed grunt or a sniff. Did you hear the Johnsons are splitting up...I knew it wouldn't work out, I mean, he comes from old money and she's from the wrong side of the tracks. The kid sits there and wonders if the money is a faded, crumpled up dollar bill, and he ponders the idea that the railroad tracks he thought were supposed to carry really cool trains now have a good side and a weird, bad side. All of a sudden there are new images, very different ones, thanks to an off-handed remark and a tone of voice. They don't make sense to a six-year-old but they came from a trusted family member so they must be okay. The Johnsons are crummy. He comes from old money and she's from the wrong side of the tracks.
I had a high school Latin teacher who dished out a list of words each week that were to be analyzed according to their Latin roots, and I distinctly remember a discussion about the word education. E meant out of in Latin, duc came from the word for lead, and ation traced its origins to the word for the state or process of. Education, ergo, was the process of being led out, and immediately someone raised her hand and asked "Out of what?" whereupon Ellen K.Wuori replied that education was the process of being led out of the darkness, and she clearly meant a lack of enlightenment that had nothing to do with an inability to conjugate verbs. She went on to say something about people having cobwebs in their brains, a phrase she mentioned frequently, and the need to clean out the mess, the kind that was, for example, in full force during the birther movement a few years back and that had people stocking military-style weapons in their coat closets in case an army of Muslims parachuted into the parking lots and cornfields of America. It's the mental clutter that also suppresses voter registration and provides less than perceptive juries, such as the one I was on twenty years ago when the foreman, a guy with a buzz cut, kept grumbling about the defendant's long hair. It makes people who understand the intricacies of the tax code and the endocrine system unable to grasp the concept of a shared humanity, let alone a shared citizenship, and it is so ingrained as to be almost genetic in nature. Some manage to shrug it off but most are stuck with it for a lifetime, and it is, as Miss Wuori said, a mess.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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