Aw shucks...

I get more jollies out of being a "pillar of strength" to young males than I do anything else in life (except maybe my LTR -- he was effectively a boy when I met him; we've been together over 40 years now -- and certain pieces of music -- Parsifal, the Magic Flute, the Diabelli Variations, the b minor mass.) One never knows as a BL how "being there" for a young male is going to turn out, but when it turns out well, it's such an incredible reward -- see recent posts by Irish BL and Sharpshooter on meeting their YF's years later. (And I've got a little secret to share -- it looks as if for the first time in decades, I have a real yf -- I mean someone whom even Icarus would accept as a real yf. He's 9 years old, showers me with hugs and kisses when we meet, and I'm going to figure out a way to get him the education he needs.) Yes, the US has more than its share of rags-to-riches tales, going all the way back to Jackson and Lincoln (our country was founded by polished aristocrats-- one reason we've survived so long; men like James Madison were deeply read and designed a framework that has lasted fairly well and one thing they did do was help build a system that lowered obstacles to the rise of those from poor and deprived backgrounds. I worry that we're losing that -- class divides have become much more rigid and the yawning gap between the tastes and mores of our ruling class and hoi polloi has become ever wider; Trump's political brilliance lies in his ability to recognize and exploit that -- he channeled class rage and resentment in a way that no American politician since, perhaps, William Jennings Bryan has succeeded in doing. (the essence of the Democrats' political peril is that they refuse to recognize what happened and their own role in it -- they deliberately ditched the white working class in favor of a rising feminized managerial elite. But it is very very dangerous to deny a political voice to a whole swathe of society -- if you won't give voice to their concerns, over time someone else will.) Yes, stories like that of J.D. Vance and Rob Henderson (and your own story) suggest that it is still possible for people with very little in the way of advantages to "make it" -- and I wish there were more such stories. But the phenomenon is not limited to the United States. Consider the examples of men like Kakuei Tanaka and Thaksin Shinawatra who clawed their way to the top of societies characterized by far more entrenched social hierarchies than we have -- and in the process earned the loathing of the "good people" who resorted to lawfare and other means to bring them down; the life arcs of men like Trump and Vance are not limited to Americans. And if we had a more cosmopolitan elite -- an elite that understood that their worldviews and experiences are not universal at all but very particular and even freakish in the broad sweep of world history -- we might not be in the political peril in which we find ourselves. God bless you. SR