Once upon a time there was a tweet from a Columbia professor.
Can you feel the hatred coming off those words?
Educated Hillbilly sure can, and he has thoughts on the hordes of urban women who move to the big city to find meaning in a career – especially those who make a job out of trashing their own families.
Apparently a lot of people liked (or hated) his thoughts because as of the time of this writing, he had 771,000 views on that tweet.
I'll put the rest of his thread in a text box:
I've seen enough to get a fix on this gal and I've seen her type a million times. And they're a dime a dozen in the writing world. They almost always go into the arts... never the sciences. Because your intelligence can be measured in the sciences. Writing is subjective.
Molly here grew up poor, TN I believe she said, but she mentions "poor" & "the south" about a million times. She's making a point here. That she has the authority to speak on these topics & tell the liberal NY writing society that they're correct to hate rural white poors.
She absolutely hates her parents, hates having to grow up in & around all that poor, all that filth, all their ignorance. Imagine knowing you're better than everyone else & having to share a school bus with them. A lunch table. A class room. The rage builds for 18 years.
Make no mistake I would bet Molly here has a mildly above average IQ & was probably in a[n] underfunded school system. Most rural schools get the left overs after the cities take all the money.
I would also bet my IQ is much much higher & my aptitude testing probably blows hers out of the water. But I digress... She knows better than this filth. She knows she's destined for better things than her ignorant father.
And slamming her father & where she's from is her ticket into the world she so desperately wants to be a parts of. The world she looks at from behind the glass for so so long. She wants to be accepted, to be one of them, to be on the other side of the glass looking out not in.
Make no mistake, she hates her parents & where she grew up. But she can use them now that she's free. Away from home, in college, with that scholarship she worked so hard for to escape that hell hole. She's among her people now. Free of the unwashed.
It probably started organically, a comment here a slam there & next thing she knows the cool kids from NY old money families are hanging on her every word of hate for her home & father. She's telling them everything they've always believed & they cant get enough.
She enthralls them with tails of her ignorant father. With every telling he gets slower, more racist. His house becomes a broken down mobile home, then a shack. He's probably drooling by her senior year.
Every negative feeling & thought she's ever had about where she's from gets her praise from her peers. She's made it, she's arrived. She's accepted. She's one of them...
But what happed you ask? Why is she so angry & full of rage & hate now? She got what she wanted? She made it, she's in NY. A professor. Around her kind all day. A published author. How can someone get their wish at 28 & still be so bitter, hate filled & angry?
Because once again she knows she's better than this. An apartment in Flatbush? Ikea bookshelves? She should be buying her kitchen knobs at Restoration Hardware not f****** Home Depot. My god the people there are no better than the plebs back home.
She gets on social media & sees some of those hicks back home are driving brand new F150's, buying homes, having kids, showing off the new deck they built or the new kitchen their wife has wanted for years. THEY'RE A F****** WELDER FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! I TEACH AT COLUMBIA!
Her NY friends (at least some of them) had trust funds, came from money, had a grandparent pay their way. But here she is paying back money that if her stupid ignorant father just hadn't been so stupid & poor she wouldn't have to be paying back.
As if it was even possible her hate grows deeper. Her father is responsible for why she isn't as well off as her friends. He didn't give her a trust fund. The stupid ignorant blue collar hicks back home shouldn't be buying homes... or be happy.
She's 28, deeply in debt & unhappy. Life wasn't supposed to be this way. She did the thing. She followed the playbook. She made it. She arrived. Is this really it?
Yes Molly... it is.
There are 2 big age moments in your life.
- When you realize you're no longer a kid & your "youth" is in the past. (28-32)
- And when you realize you're old & there is more life behind you than in front of you. (45-55)
Obviously the ages vary on the person, but she's hit #1.
And instead of reflecting, rebuilding a relationship with her father, re-evaluating her world view. She went with what she knows, what's never failed her & doubles down.Yes... it's the ignorant, racist hicks' fault. They are to blame.
"They" objected to paying off her loans. "They" object to defunding police departments. "They" pointed out the violence at BLM riots. If they would just fall in line Molly could finally be happy & get what's coming to her. What she's earned. What's right.
I'm 49 & at life stage #2 now. And I see "her type" from my generation & where they end up. I'd give details but this is the internet & I don't feel like shaming people I know IRL. But none have ended up where they thought they would.
All have regrets.
If I could give Molly one piece of advice... you will only have one father. No matter what evils you've lumped onto him he brought you into the world & unlike many he stuck around. Some don't have a father to hate.
You can still fix this.
This doesn't have to end with you bawling over a tombstone, begging, pleading, aching for just 5 minutes to take it all back. I've seen this & you are not prepared for that pain when it comes.
If you don't want to ponder that, go watch "Sweet Home Alabama" or, well, any of 3,000 Hallmark movies where a big-city girl working long hours for some company is sent on a boring assignment to the small town and ends up finding love and herself in the process.
There's a reason those films are being pumped out by the dozen. They speak to a deep wound that many, especially women, feel when they think of home and family. The hard truth is that the world has lied to us. It's told us we have to do things its own way instead of finding the simple joys that make life worth living. It's sold us the rat race instead of commitment and family. Unfortunately, whenever someone points out that we've bought the lie, we tend to run and lock our Twitter profile instead of accept that hard truth.
As a man with four daughters myself, the thought of my own child becoming a prodigal kid with a haughty, resentful spirit saddens me to no end. There is so much more to life to discover... most of it begins with the simplest things. Those good ol' boys with the beat-up F150 and five kids know a heck of a lot more about it than the corner-office manager working up the corporate ladder.
That's something to think about as you reflect on family this Father's Day!
