Liberal elitism was on full display when the video of Michael Bloomberg came out of him essentially mocking farmers by saying he “could teach anybody to be a farmer”. He said, dismissively, that “It’s a process, you dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn” but that ‘information technology required “a lot more gray matter”.
It was stunning but not surprising. Having an elitist New York City billionaire, now running for President as a Democrat, essentially admitting how the Left views the people who farm for a living⏤as dumb simpletons.
Coastal Democrats, whose hands are as soft as butter, have been able to get away with hiding their disdain for the hard-working calloused-handed people in the heartland of America, the people who really make it work, for far too long. Better to get it out there now before the election.
What’s so despicable about Bloomberg’s statement is what it infers, which is that people who work with their hands are inferior to those who work with their ‘brains’, and that the former precludes the latter. This attitude has elevated so-called intellectualism and devalued ‘manual’ or physical labor. That arrogance has softened us as a country and created a horrible sense of entitlement in our youth but worse, it’s created people who are chronologically adults but who can’t actually take care of themselves. It’s why, according to CBS New York, ‘millennials who feel they lack some basic life skills can now take “adulting” classes, which are expanding across the country. The classes teach life skills like cooking, budgeting and time management’. Adulting classes? Isn’t that what parents are for? And these are likely kids with extensive ‘higher education’, so what have they actually been taught?
It gets down to values. What happened in the post-Depression era is that all of the parents who wanted to ‘give their kids everything they never had’ forgot to give them what they did have, and which enabled them to survive the Great Depression and the subsequent WWII rationing, which is strength, fortitude, perseverance, self-sufficiency, and a hard work ethic.
They made it too easy for their kids, their kids did the same to theirs, and so on, and now we have two generations of state-school indoctrinated snowflakes who not only don’t own much⏤less know how to use a hammer or screwdriver, but who’ll spend $400+ on ‘mud-stained’ jeans, made to look like the wearer had been working in the rough. Such a thing would’ve been unheard of 20 years ago and laughed at. It miffed Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs: “This morning, for your consideration, I offer further proof that our country’s war on work continues to rage in all corners of polite society,” he wrote of the jeans. “Finally — a pair of jeans that look like they have been worn by someone with a dirty job…made for people who don’t.”
Somehow, in the name of aspiration, people who worked with their hands and their backs began to be looked down upon and college became a bigger goal for parents who ‘wanted the best for their kids’. It’s fine to have goals and aspirations and certainly there’s nothing wrong with obtaining more education, I myself have a couple of degrees. But most people, unless they were going to be doctors or lawyers, didn’t used to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans for what are often useless degrees, and a majority of people when I was growing up worked to pay their way through school, and the most they would owe would’ve been a few thousand dollars.
All that has changed, and the student loan debt, subsidized by an overly generous federal government, is so bad – $1.5 trillion – and causing so much angst by the students who hold it, that a socialist/communist presidential candidate has a real chance of getting the Democrat nomination by promising to forgive their debts.
Meanwhile, rather than teach our own students the skills they need for the marketplace, we’re teaching them stupid, unnecessary things and importing people with those skills from other countries to fill the jobs they could do.
Part of that, of course, is because Big Business wants cheap labor. The other part is that despite the fact that the U.S. spends more per capita than any other country on education, the U.S. only ranks 14th out of 40 in education. ‘According to Pearson, the United States has a “cognitive skills and educational attainment” score of 0.39, which makes the United States rank fourteenth out of forty countries ranked in that category.’ So what exactly are we paying for? And actually, many jobs that are currently available don’t require a 4-year degree. Vocational training is relatively inexpensive and facilitates jobs with good salaries, and electricians, construction workers, landscapers and plumbers are just as valuable as any IT coder! Let’s have more woodshop and metal shop and less gender studies classes!
These are components of larger issues facing our country, problems which have gotten so far out of hand that only with the Presidency of someone like Donald Trump would it have seemed even possible to turn around, and I’m still not sure we can. The American ‘values’ have been so assaulted in an attempt to change them that merely addressing them can bring charges of insensitivity and uncaring. But address them we must.
Immigration must work not for multi-national corporations but for the American worker and we must promote an educational system which is practical and creates skills useful to the marketplace rather than fulfill a Left-wing agenda and enrich teachers unions. We need to value and respect all work, and make sure the jobs available can be filled by a well-prepared American populace.
It’s good that Bloomberg said what he said⏤just as Hillary Clinton said with her Deplorables comment, at least voters know where Democrats really stand when it comes to hard working everyday Americans.