Power and privilege

MT started an interesting thread in the group and it made the mind spin around thinking about everything around the actual questions. For starters one isn't sure you can separate class from privilege. They may not be the same thing, but they certainly stem from each other. We are middle class and we have both been afforded all the privileges that extend from that. But that is a debate for another time... back to this...

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