I was speaking the other day to a friend who’s one of the City of Raleigh’s leaders. He was telling me about the book he’d been reading, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Though there are many insights in Gladwell’s book, my friend was particularly taken with the point Gladwell made that no one does it alone.
“It’s true,” he told me. “The people who think they made it themselves are fooling themselves. Everybody, everybody who’s ever ‘made it’ did so with someone else’s help.”
I completely agreed. All my youthful naivety about how America is supposed to work – how we’re a classless society and ‘all men are created equal’ – has always been sheer fantasy. I look at some of the kids in my side of town, growing up in some of the toughest situations imaginable. The deck is so overwhelmingly stacked against them that it’s a wonder anyone manages to escape the cycle of poverty and violence.
I think about my friend who was once a fanatical, screw-the-poor conservative Republican until the day his utility company job gave him an uncomfortably close-up look at life in tough neighborhoods. What he saw rocked him to the core and gave him a fresh understanding of the immense challenges others face.
I’m a white male in a white male-dominated society. I was fortunate to be raised in a loving, nurturing, happy family. My kids are being raised in a loving, nurturing, happy family. I have a good job, my wife has a good job, and our future looks brighter every day.
I am fully aware of the advantages I enjoy. I am also fully aware of the advantages that some of my neighbors do not enjoy – through no fault of their own. I do not blame the poor for being poor, nor do I blame the kids who have few role models for losing their way. I can’t fathom the hubris that some people show towards our less well-off neighbors. And yet some people remain foolishly and selfishly convinced that what they’ve achieved was due entirely to their own work. It’s bullshit.
Every one of us got where we are with help from someone else. Every one of us has someone to thank for our success. Every one of us owes a debt to someone.
No one accomplishes anything by themselves. Nothing by yourself.
Along those same lines, most of the people I’ve met in my life that had “made it” financially were mostly lucky in being at the right place at the right time. They weren’t smarter, better educated, or even particularly hard workers.
What about being a Republican makes you “a fanatical, screw-the-poor conservative”?
Warren, nothing about being a republican does that. However there are, unfortunately, enough Republicans like that that it has become an all too common stereotype.
I’m pretty sure that my morning activities on the toilet was done by myself…