Becoming you

Human beings are born essentially tabula rasa or a “blank slate.” That simply means we have to learn how to do everything through living and replicating the behaviors we see in others because we aren’t born with any a prior knowledge. Scientists generally agree that some people are born with certain skills or abilities but even those have to be nurtured through interactions with others. For example, a person may be born with an innate skill to be an extraordinary concert pianist but if they never sit down at a piano, they will never know. That’s why one of the best parenting skills is to expose children to as many different things as possible because they may have a special talent without even knowing it.

This preface is written to explain, at least in part, why some children grow up bad and others grow up good. It takes place through what we in Sociology call the socialization process and it means we are what we learn. In fact, we don’t have the ability to be anything or anyone else. The evidence is very clear that criminals usually come from criminal families, gamblers from gambling families, abusers from abusive families, etc. Whatever we see and hear in our own family we accept as being the norm because we’re exposed to that kind of behavior far more often than any other kind of behavior.

What that means, of course, is the divisions we see in society today have always been there and always will be. Some parents raise their kids the right way, some the wrong way and some don’t raise them at all and that’s not ever going to change. We’ve always had law-breakers, good-for-nothings and people who will lie, cheat and steal to get the best of people who don’t and that won’t change either. So when you look at a person who will do anything to keep from working or a person who only looks out for themselves or a person who breaks the law on a regular basis with no guilt attached to it at all, you’re looking at people who were raised the wrong way and there’s very little they or anyone else can do about it.

We have many self-help agencies in this country that try and help people get back on the straight and narrow but most of them don’t work and those that do, work for only a small portion of the people who use them. We use rehab in this part of the country a lot for people with alcohol or drug problems and those are highly ineffective as well. Some people see the light, most don’t. Those that don’t jump through the hoops and do what they’re told to do while in rehab only to hasten their way OUT of rehab and once they get out, they go back to the same people, places and situations that got them into trouble to begin with.

I’m reading a biography right now about Chief Justice John Roberts of the U.S. Supreme Court and it’s no surprise that Justice Roberts was raised in wealth and had parents that insisted that he excel at everything he did. So even at a young age, he had little sympathy for those who had less than him or achieved less than he did because he saw it as their fault. The attitude of the upper class is that failure is not an option and parents do whatever they can to ensure that their children never fall into that trap. On the other hand, lower class parents are, for the most part, satisfied if their children get ANY kind of job as long as they make enough money to support themselves so the parents don’t have to any longer. President Donald Trump had the same kind of uprising that Chief Justice Roberts had most of us know people personally who had the other kind of upbringing that more often leads to failure than success.

So the only thing about society that has changed since I’ve been alive is an ever-changing gap between the haves and the have-nots and a resentment among those who feel like they are being left out of the American dream. Until everyone feels like they have an equal opportunity to succeed or fail, that malaise will continue.