Blades of Wheat Redux

Recently I had an interesting Facebook discussion with some West Virginia friends about organ donation. It was fun to disagree civilly with thoughtful people, to think through some of the nuances. It occurred to me afterward that it's not actually accurate to think of them as hometown friends, because they've all left our hometown. 

All the smart kids left.

It sounds stark and maybe elitist to put it that way, but I can't think of a single person from, say, the math team who's still in the small town where we went to high school. There must be somebody from AP physics who still lives there, but I don't know who it would be.

Pretty much as soon as we moved there (I was starting sixth grade) I was planning my departure. At age 10 I knew I was going to college far away and I was not coming back. I've posted before about my angst as a misfit smart kid. I didn't know at the time how many of my friends were also going to leave and not come back.

What happens to a community when the smart kids mostly want to leave?

I've been thinking since the election about the class divide that propelled Trump to victory. I've been thinking more recently about the lessons I carry with me from half of a childhood spent in a coal-country small town.

The issue came up during The Awful Conversation on Thursday, when this other mom wanted me to know that despite my condescending self-important presumption to the contrary, she was a smart person too. With a graduate degree, she'd have me know. This was one of several moments when I wondered if I had slipped into an alternate universe, because in my real life I am super-cautious about how I present myself. I am vague about what I do (you might be surprised at how often "I work at the university" translates into "she probably does secretarial work; she has five kids, after all" in a small-talk setting); I am evasive about my qualifications (I spent my whole doctoral program talking vaguely about being back in school-- not graduate school, not a doctoral program, not unless the listener persisted in asking questions); I am careful about the words I use. Thirty years after I went to junior high in small-town West Virginia, I still don't want to stand out as overly smart.

This is a quirk of mine that you probably would not predict if you know me only from the blog, because this is my space to be who I am. I didn't talk about the Crazy Shakespeare Project to anyone outside my family, I don't think, because I quake at the thought of sounding pretentious. Some people have blogs that describe their secret lives as swingers or what have you; I have a blog where I rhapsodize about my secret love of Dickens and Trollope and use whatever words I please. Stridulation flocculent howdah orchiectomize! Wheee, freedom!

So it might sound a little weird to you to hear that I worry about this issue to the extent that I do. I still think about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, where the tallest blades of wheat had their heads snicked off. This is a mixed-up jumbly post, and I was on the point of giving up on it when my 17yo read the draft and said, "You should post that, Mom, because it's important to talk about anti-intellectualism." So here's what I'm thinking, I guess. 

1. I feel unreasonably wounded by an angry person's accusation that I think I'm smart, as if my failed efforts to fly under her smartness radar are also a moral failing. This does not make a lot of sense. It is not a good use of emotional energy.
2. Six years later I am still looking for a fitting-in strategy, in which I can be the person I am while also being sensitive to the people around me. That need to balance honesty and humility is tricky.
3. In the bigger picture: Anti-intellectualism is a cancer. Remember when I linked to that article about West Virginians leery of Hillary Clinton's guillotines, the ones she was planning to use on Christians and Second Amendment supporters? I can't say that there's a causal link between the creation of a culture in which the smart kids plan to flee and the existence of a culture with pockets of Bartholomew Cubbins-level tinfoil hattery. But I can say that the association does not surprise me.