Shut Up, We Don’t Care About You: More Lessons from the Covid-19 Crisis

By Pete Bowen and Bailey Bowen

SON OF A SHARECROPPER
In mid-February—just two months and a lifetime ago—my wife and I were in her hometown of Dothan, Alabama, for her high school reunion and to spend time with her father.

My father-in-law is the son of a sharecropper without much formal education. He grew up in one of the very poorest areas of the US, his bedroom the covered porch of a country house. He became a union pipe-fitter working at paper mills and nuclear power plants.

His wife had a good job working for the state. My in-laws owned their own home, had several businesses over the years, and even bought a brand-new Cadillac. In the 1970’s, that meant that you had accomplished something.

More important than any of that, they had a strong marriage and very good friends and they were happy.

My mother-in-law passed almost exactly 3 years ago. Hundreds came to her funeral not from obligation, but from love and respect.

My father-in-law misses her deeply, but he carries on, day-to-day, supported by and supportive of all those friends.

He’s a guy who will drive 10 hours to help you change a car tire—whether he’s met you or not.
WAFFLE HOUSE: WISDOM AND CONTEMPT
We visit Dothan a couple times a year and we always make it a point to have at least one meal at the Waffle House around the corner. It’s been a thing for 30 years.

So, in mid-February, we’re having a midnight breakfast at the Waffle House. We have the privilege of being served by Shea, a young woman who is working 3rd shift to cover for a co-worker. Shea always fills my coffee cup at exactly the right moment—often coming from across the room.

“How do you always know when I need coffee?” I ask.

“I can tell by the angle you hold the cup when you drink,” she tells me.

Maybe that’s something that all servers know. Maybe she figured out on her own. Either way, I respect her wisdom and am better for listening to it.

When many of my friends, comfortable in the economic top 10% of America, found out I eat at Waffle House, they looked at me like I’m crazy.

They wouldn’t be caught dead at a Waffle House. Ever.

Wrong kind of food. Wrong kind of people.

A few years ago, a friend group passed around an online quiz that analyzed you based on where you’ve eaten. Applebees and Chilis and similar restaurants were on the list. They mocked the restaurants and the “type of people” who eat at them.
THE 9.9% AMERICAN ARISTOCRACY
Many of us are firmly embedded, by our wealth and attitude, in what Matthew Stewart called the American Aristocracy in his essay The 9.9 Percent is the New American Aristocracy from The Atlantic.

Stewart differentiates the top .01% of ultra-rich Americans from the 9.9% of the rising American Aristocracy from the 90% of the rest of Americans. A major point of the essay is that the 90% have very little opportunity or hope of rising into the new, 9.9% aristocracy.

According to Stewart—and I think he has this right—the top 9.9% see themselves as “meritocratic winners” with attitudes of “its good to be us” and “we’re crushing the competition below.”

They have “mastered the old trick of consolidating their wealth and privilege, and passing it along to their kids.”

While I think Stewart gets some conclusions wrong, his data about and description of the 9.9% American Aristocracy are compelling. Stewart says that we, the American Aristocrats, have locked in, for ourselves, huge advantages in education, jobs, family stability, neighborhood and health.

We’re smarter. We’re richer. We have more prestigious jobs and a much lower divorce rate. We live in better neighborhoods and go to better schools. We’re better people because, well, look at what we’ve accomplished.

We spend our time talking only to the right people (that’s us) with the right attitudes about the right topics in the right restaurants. It becomes an echo chamber where we know that we are right because all the other educated people like us ...