Something that happened yesterday while Kyle was playing with a group of neighborhood kids set me to thinking about whether Marsha and I are doing enough to avoid class consciousness, or to prevent it from infecting our children. Of all the classic virtues, this quality of ignoring differences in social rank must be the hardest to practice; it's hard for me, and it's rare enough in the culture that it must be hard for other people, too. Trying to think this morning of people who do embody this virtue, I could think of only one good example: some friends of ours named Scott and Mandy Ellertson have always seemed admirably unconscious of class differences, and seem to be doing a good job of raising their kids to be the same kind of people.
