Small Town Classism

I tend to agree with Uncle Ken, it's a class system not a caste system. The caste system that they have in India, however, was originally based on race or color. The word "caste" itself means "color" in India. I think they legally abolished their caste system some time ago, but it still lives on as a social thing. American slavery certainly was a caste system, but it had less to do with color than with ancestry. If your mother was a slave, you were a slave, no matter who your father was. Thomas Jefferson's girl friend, Sally Hemming, was actually 3/4 White, and the four kids he had with her were 7/8 White, yet they were all slaves because their mother was a slave. How weird is that?

I don't remember ever not wanting to learn something in school. There was a subculture that thought it unseemly to get good grades or participate in classroom discussions, but I never joined that group.

I don't know that there is an optimum age for making friends. I think it has more to do with what's going on in your life at the time. When Uncle Ken went off to college, he left most of his Chicago friends behind so, if he wanted to have friends, he needed to make new ones. Kids who move frequently probably find it easier to make new friends, but their friendships probably don't run as deep as the ones made by less transient families. I'm just guessing here, I don't remember giving the matter a lot of thought in my younger days. I always had friends, but I don't remember making any kind of effort to get them.

I was surprised to hear people talk about class so much when I first moved to Cheboygan. What ever happened to "All men are created equal."? It seemed to be mostly centered around family names. I suppose money must have played a role in it, but I don't remember people comparing net worth with each other. I suppose, if you knew all the family names in town, you would also know which families had the most money, so there was no need to mention it. I didn't pay much attention to it at the time, I thought it was just silly, but it was important to a lot of people, and might still be for all I know.

The only ethnic minority we have here are the Native American Indians. Well, unless you count the Poles, the Swedes, and the French, but most of those have been here so long that they don't remember where they came from. By that standard, however, the Indians should be totally assimilated by now, since they've been here the longest. I think that they would have been too, if the government hadn't  started granting them special privileges. I know there were people in the paper mill who didn't even know they were Indians until they looked it up to see if they qualified for anything.