In spite of growing up in similar backgrounds they were not
the same. His family are working class, with a comfortable amount of money, and
He became first generation snob by attending university. Meanwhile one small
slave's parental units were first generation snobs and auntie and uncle were
all the more odd in that, although they were working class, they owned land...
something that probably wouldn't have happened in their native England. See the
colonies do have a tendency to level some... though not all... class
structures. We just like to pretend they don't exist J
His family were big on parental responsibilities while the parental
units at this end were... surprisingly neglectful of things like... oh let's
see... curfews, wanting to know where you had been all day, what you did over
the weekend, if you had actually gone to school, why you slept all afternoon...
you know stuff that would have landed His parents on his back in a heartbeat. The
ironic thing is that He would have thrived in a household that believed there
was no wasted education (his parents believe that you get an education to get a
job) and that age appropriate reading meant you could read it with minimal
assistance from a dictionary... and no parental input whatsoever.
Who knows He might have got to the Marques De Sade before Nietzsche...
his life could have been very different a lot sooner J
Personally one has always thought that the beach holidays He
was made to suffer through year after year sounded pretty awesome. And regular
meals... actually meals in general... and His mother's legendary biscuit tins
sound, well are, pretty awesome too. Oh one would still have rebelled; it's
what children do, but one suspects that the rebellion would have been so much
more... middle class and a lot less unseemly that the route one actually took.
It would have probably culminated in marriage to an inappropriate husband or
two, judging by how His sister has turned out.
The bottom line is though that in spite of the differences
there are enough cross over privileges that we rub along together very well. We
both attended the same university and were indoctrinated by them, we both never
really wanted for things, we both had people that loved us enough that we could
go on to form a loving attachment to someone else and we both grew up with a
roof over our heads. We have similar values... we both loath working.
We are Mother Nature's grasshoppers who were raised by ants...
bless them. Well His at any rate... his still have full biscuit tins J
4 comments:
I find that background experiences do matter. Even though it was for very different reasons, both H and I moved around a LOT when we were kids. I think that we share something from that, among other things.
Shared separate experiences. :)
Yay for full tins..
We call them cookies :D
I couldn't muster a reply to that thread because my understanding (and experiences) of "privileged" isn't "western/capitalist" and now that I do live in a "capitalist/western" society--I can't really have anything in common, in that retrospect, with whomever ends up with me.
I'm a grasshopper, he's an ant.
My Master moved a lot when he was growing up. We never moved at all.
His dad is a pastor and that is what they do, get moved around constantly. His mom was a social worker (now retired). My parents were both laboratory assistants in chemistry and biochemistry until they retired to become a farmer (my mom) and a botanist (my dad).
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