Shut Up, We Don’t Care About You: More Lessons from the Covid-19 Crisis

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By Pete Bowen and Bailey Bowen

SON OF A SHARECROPPER

In mid-February—just two months and a lifetime ago—my wife and I were in her hometown of Dothan, Alabama, for her high school reunion and to spend time with her father.

My father-in-law is the son of a sharecropper without much formal education. He grew up in one of the very poorest areas of the US, his bedroom the covered porch of a country house. He became a union pipe-fitter working at paper mills and nuclear power plants.

His wife had a good job working for the state. My in-laws owned their own home, had several businesses over the years, and even bought a brand-new Cadillac. In the 1970’s, that meant that you had accomplished something.

More important than any of that, they had a strong marriage and very good friends and they were happy.

My mother-in-law passed almost exactly 3 years ago. Hundreds came to her funeral not from obligation, but from love and respect.

My father-in-law misses her deeply, but he carries on, day-to-day, supported by and supportive of all those friends.

He’s a guy who will drive 10 hours to help you change a car tire—whether he’s met you or not.

WAFFLE HOUSE: WISDOM AND CONTEMPT

We visit Dothan a couple times a year and we always make it a point to have at least one meal at the Waffle House around the corner. It’s been a thing for 30 years.

So, in mid-February, we’re having a midnight breakfast at the Waffle House. We have the privilege of being served by Shea, a young woman who is working 3^rd shift to cover for a co-worker. Shea always fills my coffee cup at exactly the right moment—often coming from across the room.

“How do you always know when I need coffee?” I ask.

“I can tell by the angle you hold the cup when you drink,” she tells me.

Maybe that’s something that all servers know. Maybe she figured out on her own. Either way, I respect her wisdom and am better for listening to it.

When many of my friends, comfortable in the economic top 10% of America, found out I eat at Waffle House, they looked at me like I’m crazy.

 

They wouldn’t be caught dead at a Waffle House. Ever.

Wrong kind of food. Wrong kind of people.

A few years ago, a friend group passed around an online quiz that analyzed you based on where you’ve eaten. Applebees and Chilis and similar restaurants were on the list. They mocked the restaurants and the “type of people” who eat at them.

THE 9.9% AMERICAN ARISTOCRACY

Many of us are firmly embedded, by our wealth and attitude, in what Matthew Stewart called the American Aristocracy in his essay The 9.9 Percent is the New American Aristocracy from The Atlantic.

Stewart differentiates the top .01% of ultra-rich Americans from the 9.9% of the rising American Aristocracy from the 90% of the rest of Americans. A major point of the essay is that the 90% have very little opportunity or hope of rising into the new, 9.9% aristocracy.

According to Stewart—and I think he has this right—the top 9.9% see themselves as “meritocratic winners” with attitudes of “its good to be us” and “we’re crushing the competition below.”

They have “mastered the old trick of consolidating their wealth and privilege, and passing it along to their kids.”

While I think Stewart gets some conclusions wrong, his data about and description of the 9.9% American Aristocracy are compelling. Stewart says that we, the American Aristocrats, have locked in, for ourselves, huge advantages in education, jobs, family stability, neighborhood and health.

We’re smarter. We’re richer. We have more prestigious jobs and a much lower divorce rate. We live in better neighborhoods and go to better schools. We’re better people because, well, look at what we’ve accomplished.

We spend our time talking only to the right people (that’s us) with the right attitudes about the right topics in the right restaurants. It becomes an echo chamber where we know that we are right because all the other educated people like us agree with us.

It makes us deeply condescending, self-absorbed, pretentious and dismissive.

When many young people in the 90% say that the way of life we taught them leaves them unfulfilled, burned out and anxious, we don’t bother to listen. We just dismiss them as snowflakes and crazy socialists.

When others in the 90% say that they disagree with social agendas we push, it never even occurs to us to listen or discuss. We simply tell them how they should think and, if they don’t, we dismiss them as bigots or traitors or just stupid.

Through this, we send a very strong message to the 90%: Shut up. We don’t care about you.

It never occurs to us highly-educated aristocrats that they might have a point.

It never occurs to us that we might be deeply infected with confirmation or bandwagon biases.

Worst of all, it never occurs to us to actively listen to them because we love them as brothers and sisters in America.

We do the opposite. We dehumanize them.

We call them ignorant. Bigots. Snowflakes. Fascists. Socialists. And much more.

Dehumanizing them not only means we don’t have to talk to them. It means we shouldn’t talk to them.

We don’t call their opposition disagreement because that implies that it might be worthy of discussion.

We call their opposition resentment because resentment is an immature, unreasonable emotion of the less-educated. You don’t respond to resentment. You ignore it.

When you stop to think about it, our arrogance is stunning.

We see ourselves as compassionate people seeking to help the disadvantaged.

In reality, we treat the 90% like lesser beings who are told what to do and how to think.

If they get in line, we toss them a treat.

If they don’t get in line, we crush them by shouting them down, shaming them, getting them fired, taking their kids and dehumanizing them by calling them terrible names.

Best of all, crushing them makes us feel good and virtuous.

We aristocrats might be highly-educated, but we don’t have the wisdom to understand that treating our fellow Americans this way is profoundly un-American.

We don’t have the wisdom to understand that our hypocritical, arrogant, self-absorbed and dehumanizing behavior will lead us away from the very leadership, solutions and teamwork we need to solve the Covid-19 and future crisis.

We don’t have the compassion to be sensitive to how we destroy lives.

The Covid-19 crisis is really bad. It is killing tens of thousands of our fellow Americans and costing us trillions of dollars.

Worse is what this Covid-19 crisis reveals about the deeply unhealthy dynamics in our American society.

SOLUTIONS

Obviously, these dynamics are ripping our nation apart.

So, how do we solve this?

Matthew Stewart argues that we need to use the federal government to change education, family-social and other systems to increase real opportunity for the 90%.

Fixing systems is a start, but I think that solution misses the most important problem and point.

Fixing the systems isn’t enough. Change the system whatever way you want. Educated, entitled American Aristocrats will game the new system just as they gamed the old. We’ll just find a new way to funnel contributions to get our kids in elite colleges.

The real problem is us. Real change only occurs when we change—as individuals. That means you and me.

What does that look like?

First, we need to remember that America is fundamentally different from other nations in history.

In other nations, the smarter, wealthier, aristocratic elites rule because they are the elites. All lower classes are the subjects of their rule like a peasant is the subject of the king. In this citizen-subject approach, the elites know best and everyone else gets in line.

In America, “We the people” are the leaders of our nation. We are, by design, citizen-leaders, not citizen-subjects.

Leadership is not some activity done by a group of specialists called “leaders”. In America, we are all called to be leaders of our own lives, our families, our workplaces—and our communities.

That means that all of us—the .1%, the 9.9% and the 90%–have the responsibility to become the best leaders we can. We have the responsibility to help our fellow Americans become good leaders too.

Citizen-leadership is at the very core of what it means to be an American.

Second, to become good leaders, we must seek wisdom.

Wisdom is the combination of knowledge and good character. When you know the truth and live the truth over and over, you gain wisdom about life.

Knowledge-in-wisdom helps us identify the best solutions for our nation.

Character-in-wisdom enables us to develop the trust across generations and economic classes that we need for teamwork and success.

Most important, it takes wisdom to understand our real purpose in life—Happiness—that comes from good relationships, not money or education or social status.

With that wisdom, we avoid greed, pretentiousness and condescension because they inevitably pit us against each other, destroying relationship, Happiness and success.

That’s the great life lesson I’ve learned from my father-in-law who doesn’t have much formal education, but has wisdom, strong relationships and Happiness.

Third, we must practice love.

We become what we practice. When you practice lifting weights, you become stronger. When you practice running sprints, you become faster.

The more you do anything, the more it becomes a habit and a fundamental part of your character.

Every time we demonize someone—no matter how much they might deserve it—the more it changes us for the worse. The more dehumanization gets ingrained in our being.

Every time we think we’re fundamentally better than someone else, the more arrogant we become and the easier it is to dehumanize.

These things destroy the trust and relationships we need for Happiness. They destroy the trust and teamwork we need to succeed as Americans and as a nation.

Equality can never come from a system alone. Equality only comes when people love and respect each other as human beings—no matter how much they disagree.

When we practice love, we become more-loving people with better relationships and more Happiness. When we practice love, we:

• Treat each other with dignity and respect
• We actively listen to understand each other
• We are willing to put ourselves at risk for each other

These are the lessons I learned from Shea’s example. She took her co-worker’s shift because she cared. She was always ready with the coffee because she cared. Caring and attention are part of her very nature.

Like so many other great Americans in the 90%, and whether she is conscious of it or not, Shea has wisdom that she shares by her daily example.

We, the American Aristocrats, are too educated and too successful to ever notice.

It’s why my wife and I always make a trip to Waffle House when we’re in Dothan.

There is no pretension. There is no arrogance or smug condescension. There are just good, hardworking, fellow American brothers and sisters of all ages and races and backgrounds, serving and eating together.

To practice love, we must stop treating each other as “others” or deplorables or crazy socialists or coastal elites or whatever label we use to dehumanize those we disagree with.

To practice love, we must practice treating each other as brothers and sisters in America, bound not by blood, but by a shared belief in human dignity and the leadership of “We the people”.

We’ll know that we’ve hit the mark on love when we are willing to die for each other. Even if we don’t like or agree with each other.

These lessons aren’t just for the 9.9% American Aristocrats. These are the lessons we all need to tackle crisis, reduce inequality, and maximize our success as individuals and a nation.

• As Americans, we are citizen-leaders, not citizen-subjects. We have a responsibility to each other to become the best individual leaders we can be of ourselves, our families, our workplaces and our community.
• Seek Wisdom. We must develop our knowledge and character so we can understand life. Wisdom will give us the best solutions to our crisis, and the high-trust relationships and teamwork we need to achieve success. Most important, wisdom teaches us that we find fulfillment in life through good relationships with each other, not through money or social status or educational level.
• Practice Love. When we practice love, we treat each other with respect, compassion and understanding that inspires the deepest commitment possible to each other.

These are lessons that won’t just help us through the Covid-19 crisis and the increasing class inequality in America. They are lessons that can make each of us more successful leaders in all aspects of our lives, at work, at home and in our communities.

Bailey Bowen is Pete’s youngest daughter who studied sociology at Spring Hill College. Recently furloughed, she has more time to correct her father’s writing and challenge his ideas.