Pearls: Being born on third base

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

There’s an expression that I have heard more commonly used in the past few years referring to someone being born on third base.

The full saying can be applied as follows: That guy was born on third base but thinks he hit a home run. It is, of course, a direct reference to privilege and the false sense of having pulled oneself up by the proverbial bootstraps, when the fact is that factors outside of the self influence each of our ‘starting point.’

Now, let’s be clear: I offer no suggestion pertaining to canceling privilege. I’m working hard to leave something nice for my kids. My parents modeled educational and professional life to help me. My parents’ parents came out of the Depression and built a world that benefitted their kids.

If the discussion involves demonizing privilege, then I’m out. Being a beneficiary of the responsible foresight of our predecessors should not be a point of shame.

Believing that we all start out with the same exact circumstances, and that each of us has an identical shot at success, however, is just plain false.

But for many of us, the scale of privilege is sliding. The folks who have achieved less should have worked harder and made better choices. The folks who have achieved more were lucky. That’s human nature, and there are more objective means by which we can judge whether or not privilege is in play.

There are factors of socioeconomic privilege that are commonly held for individuals born in America – they have a full spectrum of starting points, but through education and applied work, we have wonderful upward mobility. But we all know that poorer places often do not possess the same quality homes, competitive schools or general health and safety standards.

And I suppose if I had the perfect answer of how to fix these issues, I should be running for office right now. I don’t have the answers. But I don hold a viewpoint that’s probably annoying both to conservatives and to liberals.

I’m not interested in privileged individuals having to surrender any ground or to wear the unjust shame of being born into homes that have the American formula solved. I’m also not interested in privileged folks supporting an american system that keeps them winning and the others losing

No, I don’t like any solution that makes villains of successful people, nor do I wish to paint the poor as lepers and crooks.

Again, it’s the extreme that are tearing our country apart, and the sooner we abandon them, the wiser and happier we will be.

Really, I’m an educator, and it is in that field of education that I feel the easiest, most significant difference needs to happen. School must be the place where perceptions of class and economic separations come to die: we teach them all , we test them all and we hold ourselves accountable for them all.

Are there differences between students? Of course. Do some parents play a better supporting role ( or in exceptional cases, a proactive role) in promoting their children’s educational progress? You bet. Do we just teach the kids who have cooperative parents? Absolutely not.

Yes, I’m an educator, and yes I possess a bias toward my chosen field. But the reason I really prescribe it as needing to be a top priority goes beyond my personal leanings. Public education is already in place; schools are established and funded (not as they ought to be in certain cases, but they exist), so rather than taking the laborious path of privatizing all of it, why not just invest a little better in the system that’s in place.

And by the way, folks advocating for increased private schooling – who have now grown so bold as to believe that public tax money belongs in the hands of families whose kids don’t attend public schools at all – don’t really believe in canceling public education. They just don’t care if it’s so badly underfunded, that schools grow so poor and inefficient, that nobody born without privilege can reasonably hope to succeed.

So when folks born on third base start to advocate first and second base being removed from the field entirely, I don’t want to hear it. I’ll never stomp on the right of a privileged person to exercise his or her means to provide the best for the family. Success is not crime.

But I also refuse to stomp on the right of a poor person to get to school and find a path to success. And not caring whether or not that individual has a chance to succeed is the most born-on-third-base thing I have ever heard.

Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.