Do you have this in 2XL?

It's interesting to note the attitudes of retail sales people in America. Although I have been in places where shopkeepers were more obsequious than ours, America is where I really feel like an average person in an average store really doesn't mind helping me out.

Sure, there are some slackers, but you can find those anywhere, and it's not an automatic that the girl with the pink hair and facial piercings will be one of them.

The thing is, an average person working in an average store in America, is almost certainly a customer of that store. Unlike throughout most of history and even much of the world today, the wares that employees sell, are not ordinarily out of their economic reach. Employees.

This is unusual, historically, unprecedented. Purveyors of fine goods sold to fine people, and their employees shopped in class-appropriate markets.

Here, Lakeesha may shop at Sandra's store for shoes, and Sandra shops at Valerie's dress shop, and they all get their hair done by Nguyen. They don't provide services for a leisure class, they provide services for each other because specialization creates economic opportunity, but mainly because we are all the leisure class in some degree.

It's such an obvious and ubiquitous thing, I doubt many of you have even considered it special. In America, people don't mind helping me out, not because I am a better person who has the 'right' to their deference, but because we have a social compact that implicitly includes all of us doing our part to make our society better, not just that some people lead and others follow and the social order is set by god or birth, or even how much money I have.

Much of Western Europe has now followed us in this trend- I'm happy for them. But it's a much more recent trend and that's NOT merely because their economic recovery after WWII took so much time.

We have diverged from them in many ways, and class is definitely one of them. It's no accident, that try as they may, Marxist class warriors never made as much inroads here as in other places. The dividing lines here have never been as clear nor even close to as uncrossable here as there. My Fair Lady is a quintessentially European story. We sympathize with the Cinderella story, but that's mainly because we believe it happens all the time, where the concept is a mere fairy tale in other societies. I suspect that to other cultures, this sort of story is more about 'getting over' on the system by cleverly manipulating and fooling people, or simply just being fortunate or fated. We feel vindicated by it, we feel that it proves that our egalitarian principle will out- even over entrenched privilege.

Bill Gates neither expects, nor receives as much deference as an African ruler with 1% of Gates' wealth. Steve Jobs has no power of life and death over his housemaid or gardener. My economic class has no bearing on my ability to look a man in the eye and judge him according to the content of his character. Including the guy in the mirror.

Tag: Patriot's Journey (with JimK, Scott, Lil, Doug, Moorewatch and our fearless leader Drumwaster)