From David Anthony Hohol…

Something I thought to be true for most of my life was debunked during my time as a student in the hallowed halls of academia.  Now moving into my 11th year of working in the same field,  such conclusions have been clarified as a misnomer several times over. The educated culture of a society is by no means more intelligent than those who never receive a post-secondary education. In fact, some of the most idiotic, hardwood stumps I’ve ever met in my life have M.A.’s and Doctorate degrees, while some of the most intelligent have been farmers or worked on construction sites.

An education can indeed fuel one with the ability to tangibly externalize the internal mechanisms of being human.  By extension, we dissect, analyze, and place within a framework of reference all we experience in order to better know the often unforgiving reflection in our mirrors. Going from the general to the specific, from macro to micro, and back again, an education, at the very least, armed me with the information necessary to better understand my world. With that said, the tools to do so can be acquired by the most foolhardy of people. As my grandfather used to say, “Just because people have a few wrenches and a good socket set, doesn’t mean they knows how to re-build the engine of a car.”

As usual, my grandfather was right. How we use the tools we acquire throughout a lifetime, whether they be acquired through a post-secondary education or the school of hard knocks, is the true mark of intelligence; to master these tools, the mark of wisdom.

The hierarchical structure of the class system also revealed itself to be an integral part of a post-secondary education and then become the ready-made template I stepped into upon becoming professionally employed. Capitalistic principles inherently produce power structures and the Utopian ideal of a classless society thus cannot exist within a cultural construct such as our own. The Postmodern world sits upon a hegemonic hierarchical system, where some must always be subordinate to others. Such a description is an empirically defend-able portrait of society, and academia is no exception. I saw far fewer representatives of the lower class stratosphere, in comparison to those from the middle and upper classes. Pursuing an education appeared to be something simply expected of middle and upper class high school graduates.  Conversely, my fellow proletariat were often the first in their families to attend university. I sometimes ran into fellow working class souls whose parents attended, but I cannot recall even once hearing about anyone’s grandparents being university educated. It seemed I was breaking some trends.

My father was raised on a small family farm and although he flirted with the lower middle class in the early eighties, he has spent the duration of his life amongst the masses of the working class. He loved to pretend otherwise, determined to be more than his father, not knowing his father was more than most men ever could be.

I was raised in this working class atmosphere, in a small town farming community, and education was never a central point of discussion. During my high school years, never once was I approached by my parents about the possibility of attending university. With a father who flunked a grade and barely made his way through high school, and a mother who dropped out after completing only grade ten, it simply wasn’t a part of how they looked at the world. Further still, my parents started charging me rent immediately after I finished high school. The instantaneous pressure to create an income further alienated me from the idea of pursuing any kind of education, and the working class waltz continued. Lower class households do produce university graduates, but they simply are not the statistical norm. Societal expectations, learned behavior, apathy, and financial limitations all combine to reduce the numbers of the working class who enroll in university. Yes, there are those who through hard work make the leap. I am one of them, but the fact of the matter is the percentage of those who have fallen from the middle class far out number those who have raised the social bar.  Further still, the number of those born into middle class families and above who receive an education are gargantuan in comparison to the working class. As I’ve already stated, being educated doesn’t make one better or even more intelligent than someone who isn’t. What it does do however, is create the opportunity to utilize intelligence.

My simple upbringing, along with ten years of post high school blue-collar employment exposed me, almost exclusively, to the proletariat lifestyle.  I never really thought about at the time, but I simply didn’t know many people who’d gone to university. I never really knew people who had money or security, or met anyone who traveled to places like Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. This all changed once I entered university life. During my undergraduate years, more than seventy percent of the students on campus had middle or upper class backgrounds. It was a bit odd for me when I first came to know these people; they were such strange souls. I soon realized just how differently we think, when separated by the almighty tax bracket.

I met people whose parents were doctors, lawyers, financial consultants, CEOs, corporate presidents, vice presidents, judges, psychiatrists, stockbrokers, politicians, scientists, as well as a variety of successful independent entrepreneurs. I heard them talk of how they spent their holidays at beach houses, cottages, and condos, along with a variety of other so-called summer homes. I took classes with nineteen year-old kids who drove sports cars and luxury sedans, and talked of trips to places like England, Italy, Greece, Spain, Japan, and Egypt. They even spoke of investing in retirement plans, the stock market, and building their portfolios. All the while, many sounded as if they somehow needed to justify themselves for having been given so many opportunities. I could always tell those who had the most money. The switch was always turned on, as they forever saw themselves as being seen. I soon saw having money as being an interpretation of style that attempts to validate and rationalize the benefits that come with it. The views many held and the causes they stood behind seemed more obliged than anything. It was almost like they looked through the catalogue of the latest charities or events, and chose what was most fashionable that year. Plastic contrivance was everywhere.

What always gave away the richest, as many did indeed try to hide the fact they came from money, was their skewed perception of finance. Beyond the obvious clue of spending a lot of money around campus, their mentality in terms of annual income was also very telling. I was once assuredly told by a twenty year-old daughter of a man who bought and sold businesses for a living, that she had some poor friends. I immediately suspected her idea of depravity would be just a little different than mine and asked what she thought it meant to be poor. She said it was always a real struggle for her classmate, because her mother was a homemaker and her father only made forty-five thousand dollars a year. I tried to explain that many people would consider that a decent living and further still, many families get by on a hell of a lot less. She looked at me in disbelief and did so honestly. By the way, the last business her father bought and sold was a McDonald’s franchise, and he was currently planning on buying a privatized post office. These naive perspectives can’t be attributed to all those with money I came across, but the majority of those I met indeed filled these uninformed parameters.

My experience with those from the other side galvanized my notions of the class system, revealing to me not just how people live, but how they think when raised with or without money. Now having made the jump, nothing has changed; nothing, that is, except for the fact that in the back of mind I always fear a financial return to where I once was. That and I have big house in the burbs.



From David Anthony Hohol…

Now at the very beginnings of a new millennia, working class citizens continue to live a life of permanent insecurity never being sure that the current job will last or how much longer they will be able to live in their rented houses. The experience of living in fear continues to permeate daily life, as surviving from check to check in the name of the capital and production can often be a relentless endeavor. By extension, the working class lifestyle produces an almost frivolous mind-set, as living in and for the moment becomes no less than a way of life and planning for the future becomes a moot point. In other words, having fun when the chance is there to do so as well as compartmentalizing the future within the far reaches of the mind has become a philosophy of life and living for the working class masses of the Western World.

Today as in their beginnings, the best place to establish, maintain and perpetuate such a philosophy continues to be the local neighborhood pubs of communities the world over. If Mr. Durden was indeed correct in describing today’s masses as the middle children of history, without a great war and without a great depression, then local pubs and bars are like the foster homes for the bastard children of the working class. Seemingly always unable to fit and being unwanted by those they aspire to be, they cling together in tiny groups, tiny families and find meaning and acceptance only in each other. The working class is united in the great depression that is life, bounded by insecurity and dissatisfaction and grounded by a common distaste for the status quo and their inverted reflection of what they wish for but simultaneously never want to be- the dreaded, conforming, assured, amnestied, calculating, time obsessed, aura-less, ghost that is the Yuppie.

Yuppies dream of safe jobs, stable mortgages, manageable payments on their new sports utility vehicles,  a top of line barbecue for the deck with a matching set of tongs, all the while seemingly rushing towards the end of it all, the emphasis on the destination and not the journey. Initiatively impaired and creatively stunted, yuppies revolt by living a violently nomadic almost disloyal social lifestyle, bouncing around a variety of sushi bars and cocktail lounges while constantly anticipating the next trendy place to temporarily frequent. Conversely, the working class lifestyle is defined by unsafe jobs, unstable housing and used cars, but their vocations themselves are defined by repetitiveness and this transcends to their social life which is about routine, routine and more routine. Finding a spot to go after work where they are called by name, where what they drink is in front of them before they order and where they are noticed and respected while being surrounded by others from their own social rung in the ladder becomes important, the emphasis being on the journey and not the destination. And with this, the fundamental lines of division although altered and evolved still serve the same purpose and produce the same result as they did during the Industrial Revolution.  As a result the aims of both groups will forever be entirely irreconcilable. The Industrial Revolution no doubt cast the mold of Modern society and long before even my grandfather was born I believe the template for much of my life had already been set into motion.

Until the end of my twenties I lived in shackles, chained to a lifestyle that was of course possible to leave behind, as even the most maximum of maximum security prisons have had those who escaped from behind their walls. Nevertheless, it takes patience, calculating thought, dedication, determination and a little luck in order pull off the great escape. Even if one is successful there are absolutely no guarantees. I still feel haunted by my life on the inside, as it continually grabs at me, nipping at my heels, trying to recapture one of its escaped prisoners with all the furor of a viciously determined warden. Being inside the toweringly cold and incapacitating walls of the working class prison for so many years however, thickens your skin, develops your sense for opportunity and most of all your scent for blood.

The hospitality industry with it’s kaleidoscope of personalities and lifestyles, is no less than a educational experience that produces for those who open their eyes and take in all that they see, a working class degree in social psychology.  Working in the business for a long period of time and being exposed to the wide variety of ideas and individuals that came through the doors, I came to posses the gift of intuitive verbalization, whether it be colorful small talk or high-end conversations on serious topics of the day, and became a sort of social contortionist able to naturally adapt to any given situation. Furthermore, I learned to learn to listen and not pry, to sympathize and not pity as over the years I developed the ability to tune myself in to another human being. By extension, people began feel as though they could tell me things they couldn’t tell others and the role of confidant became a standard in my life. All of these qualities helped immeasurably with my work that began immediately after graduating university, which included traveling the world as an educator, becoming a writer and learning about my self and my life that was which in turn produced the very words you are reading at this moment.

Combining my working mans social psych degree with nearly five years of post-secondary study, the benefits of a classical education and a university degree produced more of something I had been lacking, seemingly, my entire life to that point- that being something called opportunity.  Opportunity is not divided equally in a democratic capitalist culture, not by a long shot, although such a culture continually trumpets the fallacy of equal opportunity for all. In today’s postmodern world ideas and technology have advanced immeasurably since the days of the Industrial Revolution, but despite the New World and the Technological Revolution, we are now in the midst of that is changing human relationships and instinctual drives by the moment, the economic dissection of society has changed very little and if anything, it continues to tighten its deadly grip on every society that subscribes to the human vice that is capitalism.

The upper class of liberal democratic societies make up a only a minute percentage of the overall population, but control the vast majority of a nations wealth living the life once reserved only for royalty. By extension, in most any modern urban sprawl there are perverse economic discrepancies, as there are those with millions and those with nothing separated by only a few city blocks and such incongruity represents the cult of self-interest that is a structural feature of any modern industrialized society. The dirty little truth of capitalism is that an entirely oppressive class system must exist. I mean it absolutely has to, as the high, the middle and the lower classes are a necessary construct for success.

By consequence those with money and thus power will have a tremendous amount of opportunity, economic and otherwise, compared to those who are economically weaker. Furthermore, those in the middle and lower classes are necessary and meet the needs of those in the upper class and are a means to the end of the entire capitalistic construct.  Those in the upper economic stratosphere need the middle class to be the teachers, the police officers, the nurses, and those in the lower class are needed to clean the toilets, pick up garbage, cook their meals and work in their factories. Simply stated an industrialized society could not function if these roles were not filled. As a necessitating consequence of such a system those beneath the upper class often are given the opportunity to earn a wage of subsistence or in other words no more money than what will allow them to maintain their necessary position in society. What the larger portion of society thus does is work to live and not much more.

With that said, the postmodern middle class most often produces for itself a sufficient lifestyle and serves as a Rockwellian portrait of comfortable success, but the economic difference between middle class and those in the upper class is incredibly, even ridiculously vast. Middle class anxiety is therefore rampant, as they feel only one medical emergency or one lost job away from sinking to the masses of the lower class. The lower class continually dreams of making the leap to the middle, but are provided with the least amount of opportunity of all, and many live in a constant state of apathy and learned helplessness. The burden of financial stress produces more divorce, more substance abuse, more teen pregnancy, more crime and far less education. Industrialized countries sell this rigged system to their own inhabitants by defining success goals as accessible to everyone, regardless of socio-economic status, race or gender, when this is hardly the case at all. This boldly represents the discrepancy between social goals and the legitimate opportunities available to achieve these goals. Everyone is encouraged to achieve success when quite simply the paths to success are only open to some. The very value system that that is born from capitalistic ideology declares to the masses that certain common symbols of success are necessary to achieve self worth and societal acceptance, but the very structure necessary for the system itself to survive scrupulously restricts or at times entirely denies the majority of the population access to the channels that are needed to do so. The very way a capitalistic society is constructed to draw the greatest energies and efforts from all those under her wing in hopes of producing the highest standard of living possible actually produces the economically challenged majority. The biggest, most manipulative and dirtiest lie that has ever been perpetrated by capitalism is that there is equal opportunity for all. I mean really… I call bullshit.