Ron Collins
Jul 23, 2017 · 4 min read

this group of Americans has seen no material gain.

The adjective I had used toward the OP, was “paternalistic”. I might also have offered “supercilious.” What I took issue with, was a kind of vertically-oriented ignorance, typical of one who considers himself as being of some “better-off” class, being used to first support a false narrative and then to do that irritating ritual of self-flagellation in saying, “I recognize why I’m better off than you, and I just feel so terribly, awfully bad about it. Please help me feel sorry for myself for being what I am and somehow making you my victim…”

The photo above, is of a brand-new porch I just finished building for a couple here in town. They paid cash for it, and for me to design and build it for them. Maybe it doesn’t look like any big deal. Heck, it’s just a porch, right?

Scratch the story a little deeper, and you find a man who grew up in Chihuahua, who came to the US as a very young man and started out doing maintenance work in industrial plants. He met a girl, a Tex-Mex gal with an easy laugh and a lovely smile, and they got married. They were very young.

When he took a new job in a new town when their sons were still babies, they moved here, a little podunk cow town nobody ever heard of out in the prairie. They wanted a home. He spotted a deal on a piece of property, an entire city block with no underground utilities or other improvements installed yet. They parked a double-wide on it, then he undertook at his own expense to place a system of trenches and pipe sufficient for their own house and for ten more mobile homes.

They started a little family-owned trailer park, and offered modest housing to others, mostly Latino like themselves, for years as their kids grew up. At some point he got out of the maintenance business and he and his wife bought a semi-truck. They went into the owner-operator business, he taught his sons to drive, and all the necessary skills to help him run the little trailer park they’d built from scratch. The sons grew up, had families of their own, one took part in the invasion of Iraq as a United States Marine, and came home safe to go back into the trucking business with his dad.

Along the way, they decided to put a permanent foundation under the original double-wide and surround the home with brick, they planted trees, they started one of the loveliest lawns in town in a part of the country that once had been called “dust bowl” and his wife waters it lovingly every day. They built outbuildings, planted gardens, and eventually sold all the single-wides still in place in the trailer park and began to simply collect rent on the lots from their new owners.

And this year some insurance agent told them their sliding glass door would require some kind of cover under the policy they were seeking, so they called me. Rather than go the minimum to please the carrier, they decided to do something nice. As we talked about options, I was just doing my job in warning them, as I do every client, that some of their ideas might get a little expensive. The man from Chihuahua said, “don’t worry about the costs, I just want to give my wife something she likes.”

And this is the sort of people that some bureaucrat in DC postures about, pretending to a wailing misplaced sentiment over their having experienced “no material gain.”

I look at people like these clients of mine, and recognize that theirs is a story utterly typical of families all over flyover America, of people who never attended college a day in their lives, who started from childhoods of perhaps a lack of amenities but also possessing that greatest form of wealth of all, which is a recognition that the continuity of a family across multiple generations and branches, is far more stable as a form of wealth than this “material gain” that any one household can claim.

Families who, by working together and materializing their own ideas with their own hands and their own tools, created for themselves and their future generations a kind of prosperity and stability no university-indoctrinated “knowledge worker” is even capable of recognizing, and which their sort would look right down their noses at if told what it would take to have it.

So what I take issue with, is the very idea that working Americans are somehow “suffering.” Or even worse, as “marginalized.” How dare anyone make such a pronouncement in behalf of people they don’t know the first thing about? How dare anyone look at lifetimes of self-made prosperity, and owing only to some perceived lack of a stock portfolio or maybe the valuations of their homes, look downward at them and call them “poor”?

I also said that working Americans do not admire this dead-weight class of over-schooled elites, do not aspire to be among them, do not want anything they have, and mostly see them as future refugees too ignorant to have read history as accurately as the plumbers and carpenters and truckers have been doing all along, and from it see that the future of a family is the only “gain” worth seeking.

    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s

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