What Do The Terms Upper Class, Middle Class And Lower Class Mean To You? Is It All About Money, Or Upbringing?

[Carswell]

Well, for me, I would definitely say I had a "lower class" upbringing. First, let me say that everything you say rings true for me.  I like the way you defined what is truly important in determining class, and I agree with every word you said.    However, I think it's more complcated than that.  Sometimes things have more than one "truth."  It?s like when you look at a cut gem--there are different facets, all of them real, but each only shows one side of the whole story.  (I want to say that the part of my own "truth" that I discuss here deals primarily with negative issues, and it presents a pretty bleak picture.  If you look only at that aspect, it would seem that I had a totally horrible childhood devoid of any kind of warmth or love.  I feel obliged to say that this was not the case.  I don't feel like I am "scarred" by my past; I actually feel it has made me stronger.  I use these examples because my experiences are a large part of how I relate to the world, and the best way I know to make my point.)   Your definition has given me food for thought.  I guess I?ve taken the definition of class very literally.  --As in:  How would I appear to others if viewed by others on a cursory level?  My definition of myself as lower class has nothing to do with my opinion of my own intelligence, abilities, or self-worth.   It is purely from a socio-economic perspective.   A lot of people are poor without being "low class," and still others live unaware of the extent of their poverty, as everyone around them shares the same circumstances.  But I was low-class in a middle class neighborhood, where the differences are profound and as such, it is hard to ignore.   Amongst our middle-class neighbors with their tidy homes and well-tended lawns, our house stood out like a sore thumb.  By the time I was nine or ten, the house was falling down.  The porch overhang had fallen off, and lay in a broken heap beside the front door.  Broken windows were mended with cardboard. Trees and weeds choked the yard.  The yard itself was festooned with all the stereotypical accoutrements of "white trash" -- including an old washing machine, a refrigerator, and the requisite rusting car on cinderblocks.  The electricity was off more than it was on.  The water had been shut off years ago and we got water from fire hydrants.  My sister and I were dirty, unkempt, and a bit feral. (This was in a time before CPS.)   I had a tough time in school because I wasn?t properly socialized.  I found out the hard way that you didn?t fart or belch in public.  You didn?t sit in assembly and pick your nose or pick scabs.  You didn't spontaneously burst into song in the middle of class just because you felt happy.  Most of the time, you couldn?t say what you really felt, and it wasn?t appropriate to display any intense emotion.  I didn?t know how to dissemble.  There appeared to be rules governing interaction between other children that they all knew and that I couldn?t fathom.    I knew nothing about matters of personal hygiene.  I can only imagine how I appeared, as there were no mirrors in our house.   In the winter, the house was freezing cold. My parents didn?t get up to help us get ready for school.  I didn't comb my hair or brush my teeth.  I slept in my clothes from the day before.  Because it was so cold, the next day, I?d just put more clothes on top of ones from the previous day, so by the end of the week I was nicely padded and probably rather fragrant as well.   We place a lot of weight on a person?s ability to be a "good provider."  People who are unable to support themselves and their families are looked down upon by the rest of society. My dad seldom worked--he couldn?t hold a job.  There was often no food in the house.  I used to routinely dive into trash cans around the school looking for other kids? lunches.  Trash can diving is not a pasttime of the middle classes, who tend to feel that ensuring their offspring are adequately fed is a priority.    Both my parents were alcoholics. Although alcoholism is by no means confined to the lower classes, it is often hidden better than it was in my family where the yelling and fights and bottle-filled trash cans kept everything very much in the forefront.  The inability to control one?s self, one?s life, and thus, one?s destiny are looked down on by our society and it is widely held to be low class behavior.    In my opinion, it wasn?t the poverty that made us low class.  It wasn?t the lack of material things.  There was no reason we couldn?t have been clean and neat.  There was no reason we kids couldn?t have been taught basic social skills.  Although my sister and I were not stupid, our emotional intelligence was badly stunted.  We didn't possess the basic skills we needed to interact and function successfully in the society we lived in.   The major reason we were low-class was because we behaved in a low class manner.    Similarly, it means little if you have all the trappings of the upper class, and no real sense of yourself and your place in the world.   We see this all the time in the celebrity train wrecks that seem to happen on a daily basis.   You need to be grounded.  You need to know who you are and how to behave, how to relate to others.   People always talk about the rights of the individual, and sometimes forget that in order to have a cohesive society, we all need to agree to certain guidelines and boundaries. Tacit acceptance of these boundaries is a sign of "class."  To use a Star Trek cliché, in the words of Spock, "[T]he needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."  We need to agree to follow certain rules to prevent chaos.  Although all people are capable of being self-centered and selfish, the lower classes(often because they weren't taught to dissemble), tend to display inappropriate emotional outbursts.  They are more likely to exhibit overtly selfish behavior than their "more socialized" counterparts, who, though they may be no less self-centered, nonetheless may have a better understanding of what is considered "acceptable behavior."    Probably because I carefully observed people and deliberately constructed an(ultimately) successful public personna, I've always been very aware of how people act and react to each other.   I find sociology and the dynamics of people in groups utterly fascinating.  I've learned a lot about the necessity of "fitting in," how groups think, the mob mentality, the importance of courtesy and respect in dealing with others, and the importance of knowing when to take up a cause and when to let things slide.   And I have to say that, in spite of all of our faults, I still think that human beings are, for the most part, endlessly fascinating and quite wonderful.    If you think of society as a single organism, you can use the analogy of the "healthy" parts attacking and trying to obliterate the "diseased," or non-conforming parts.  A useful strategy, of course, but the flip-side of that is that the non-conforming parts, however strange and frightening they may be, may contain the seeds of evolutionary change.  This modification may eventually become the norm for all, and set our species on the road to higher development and a greater understanding of what it is to be human. Umbalia 68 months ago Please sign in to give a compliment. Please verify your account to give a compliment. Please sign in to send a message. Please verify your account to send a message.