A dinner conversation that's still bothering me.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

19. The white low income voters you're referencing

have no sense at all that they are part of a larger community. Their notion of community is simply those people they personally know. No one else matters. And so poverty in another part of the world, or even another part of the country, simply doesn't connect or matter to them.

I went to Catholic school for kindergarten and first grade. We collected money, pennies and nickels mostly, and when we'd collected a total of five dollars it went off to Africa to baptize some poor African child. We actually got to choose a name for that newly baptized African child. And while as an adult I'm horrified at the white colonial ignorant privilege exemplified, I will say that it made me very aware of a world totally outside my own, one that I needed to be in some part responsible for.

So my point is that such sensibilities were not universal. Not everyone grew up in a milieu that made them understand that there are others out there who are vastly less privileged, who might need support and special help. Most people grow up in a milieu that excludes the other.

Here's my best example: some years ago, in the early days of the internet, on a bulletin board a man who taught at the University of Pittsburgh posted about his experiences teaching there. He said that many of his students were the first ever in their families to attend college. Many of them had grown up in severely limited experiences. He mentioned that many of them were unwilling to venture beyond the very narrow and constricted geographical area they'd grown up in. They honestly didn't think they could find a McDonald's or a WalMart outside their area. He also talked about a young woman in one of his classes who honestly did not think that Japanese people had existed before WWII. She somehow thought that they'd come into existence right before the war.

I've since met that man and talked about these things with him, and he remains bemused, nearly a quarter of a century later, by the insularity of his students. And yet he understands them.

Similarly, a decade or so ago, on a visit to Ann Arbor, MI, my husband fell into conversation with a woman who taught high school in a community about thirty miles away. According to her, there were still many unpaved roads there, and most of her students had never left the county they'd been born in.

Those of us who post here are, in comparison, extremely worldly, well travelled, and sophisticated. Even with the limitations of our childhoods ("cowboy hash", socks and coloring books for Christmas) we have moved far beyond those limitations, often with the encouragement of our parents. We did not stay isolated, stuck in insular communities. But that's not true of everyone And even people who grow up or live in large cities can be isolated and insular. Quite frankly, people who live in NYC are often insular in mind-boggling ways. It can take a strong determination to break out of the restrictions of our origins, to open our minds to other ways of thinking, to embrace change.

Pretty much all of us on DU are open to new ideas, new ways of thinking, no matter how much we might disagree at times. We need to remember just how privileged we are in this respect.