Can I Use Your Bathroom?

Neighbors of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are saying that the president’s daughter and her husband instructed their Secret Service detail not to use any of the six bathrooms in their home. Seriously, they have six bathrooms in their home, and they couldn’t set aside just one for the men and women there to protect them. Does this sound familiar to anyone? It reminded me of a particular movie I saw a few years ago: The Help.

 

In the movie The Help, the character Hilly, an elitist white supremacist woman, tries to get a law passed to forbid white families from letting their domestic servants use the bathroom inside the house. Hilly insists that everyone install separate bathrooms for their “help.” Minny, Hilly’s black maid, is fired for using the guest bathroom and is rendered unemployable due to Hilly's lies. Minny gets her revenge for the injustice. Minny committed what she calls a "terrible awful." After her termination, Minny brought Hilly her famous chocolate pie, but after Hilly had finished two slices, Minny revealed that she baked her own shit into the pie. If you haven’t seen the movie, I am sorry that I gave this part away, but I wanted to make a point. Maybe someone will serve the Kushners one of Minny’s famous “chocolate” pies.

 

The fact that there are people who are as elitist as the Kushners is so infuriating. The Kushners have six bathrooms in their home, yet they wouldn’t allow the men and women who are sworn to give their lives to protect them to use just one of those bathrooms. Furthermore, this elitism came at a cost to the U.S. taxpayers. Since September 2017, the federal government has spent $3,000 a month — more than $100,000 to date — to rent a basement studio, with a bathroom, from a Kushner family neighbor for the Secret Service to use.

 

I despise elitism. I especially hate academic elitism, something I have been the victim of many times. I don’t care what college or university you graduated from. It is what a person makes of their education that means more. Just because someone went to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, or Penn doesn’t make them intelligent, especially when you are too stupid to understand that your candidate lost the election. These same idiots continued their false claims when no fraud was found even after every judge and election official in the country declared the election free and fair. You are either stupid or a liar if you can’t see what has been proven over and over again. In recent days, I have heard numerous times that Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are “very smart men” because they went to an Ivy League school. George W. Bush went to an Ivy League school. I never heard even his most ardent supporters, hell I never even heard his family, say that Bush was a “very smart man” because he attended an Ivy League school, let alone any other reason.

 

I think the whole college admission scandal that Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin got caught up in showed us that just because someone went to an elite school, it does not mean they had the smarts to attend. It just proved that they had the money to get admitted and enough money to make sure they made the right grades. When I graduated high school, I got accepted to every college to which I applied. Some were the most elite colleges of the South, but my family did not have the money to pay for those colleges. I could have applied to other colleges. I have no doubt I would have been admitted to any college I applied to, but I did not have the money for the application fees for many of these colleges, and because of my parents’ very modest middle-class incomes, I did not qualify for assistance. The only scholarship at a major university I received was because a family friend called in a favor, but I did not take that scholarship because the person who was convinced to give me the scholarship could only guarantee it for one year, and he was retiring. There was no guarantee I’d get the scholarship the next year, and there would be no one to turn to for help (back then, this university only gave scholarships through their alumni association, so you were at their mercy). I chose to attend a smaller college that gave full scholarships to all high school valedictorians in Alabama, and I was my small high school’s valedictorian. 

 

I learned a very valuable lesson from attending that small college. After undergrad, I went to a graduate school with one of the top three military history programs in the country. It also had an excellent and well-respected civil rights history program. We had students from some of the most prestigious colleges in the country in our program. What I realized was that I had gotten a far better education at my small state college that always seemed to be fighting for every penny of funding they could than elite schools with multimillion-dollar endowments. I had made the most of the opportunities I had. I took advantage of every opportunity to increase my attractiveness on the job market. Yet, I struggled financially for years, trying to find a decent job. Eventually, I had to move back in with my parents in Alabama and take whatever job I could get. Being a 7th-12th grade social studies and English teacher took up all of my free time, and eventually, the funding for my Ph.D. ran out before I could finish my dissertation.

 

Through a series of unfortunate events, I found myself jobless after I had basically sacrificed everything for my job as a teacher. I had always dreamed of being a teacher. I loved teaching, but teaching the children of white supremacists at a small private school in Alabama took its toll on me. My health suffered, and I lost my job. The school hired a football coach to replace me and did not renew my contract. They gave me absolutely no notice. They never even hinted that my job was in jeopardy. I found myself jobless and penniless. Thankfully, the people who read this blog helped me out and sustained me until I found my current job thanks to those marketable skills I had worked so hard to add to my resume. Ten years ago, I would have never believed that I would now be a museum curator and a professor at one of America’s oldest colleges.

 

I know I have gotten off on a tangent and onto my soapbox about my own struggles against elitism, but the point I am trying to make is that I worked my ass off to get where I am. People in the outgoing presidential administration got everything handed to them, and they have given nothing back to society. The Kushners took their entitled and elitist attitudes and refused to allow the people who were there to save their lives the right to use just one of their six bathrooms. Thankfully, not all wealthy people are like this. There are plenty of wealthy people out there who either believe in Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth, or they just believe in helping those in need because it is the human thing to do. For those people, I am grateful. I am thankful that there are good people out there who are not selfish and elitist. I know that I will never be counted as one of the wealthy, but I believe in helping those around me whenever I can and in whatever way I can.