Coming apart from my children

Americans during my lifetime are becoming unequal and divided, not by class or income, but by something much more serious: a difference in values and interests. This has been my own experience, and now Charles Murray details the problems in his latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, (well-summarized in a Wall Street Journal essay).

 

To see just how different Americans can be from one another, the book includes this quiz, which will take you about 10 minutes to answer:

Coming Apart by Charles Murray - Quiz

Here are my results:

Question	Description	My Score
1	Neighborhood	7
2	Family job	4
3	Town population	7
4	Family income	5
5	Factory	6
6	Painful job	3
7	Evangelical	2
8	Political	4
9	Dumb friend	0
10	Cigarettes	0
11	Military	0
12	Nascar	0
13	Pickup	0
14	Beer	0
15	Fishing	1
16	Restaurants	4
17	High school letter	2
18	Kiwanis	2
19	Parade	2
20	Uniform	0
21	Greyhound	1
22	Movies	1
23	TV	0
24	Oprah	0
25	Branson	0
	TOTAL	51

According to the book, my score classifies me as a “first generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents”, which anyone who knows me well could confirm.  My wife, on the other hand, would score pretty close to zero if she weren’t married to me.  Our kids are already well-removed from “the other America”, and would know almost nothing about it if not for their grandparents.

I still treasure the friends and values I learned from my small town, Midwestern upbringing. Although I’m happy with the wonderful experiences in my life now, I think it’s a tragedy that my own children don’t understand that world anymore.