Rescued by H.E.R.O.s

Yesterday Julia and I were going down IH-35 to our shift at the San Antonio Temple when our tire went flat. We pulled over to the side of the road, and I had just got out our spare and was trying to figure out how to get the jack out of whatever was holding it in place when two trucks with flashing lights and Texas Department of Transportation logos on the side pulled up behind us. Two gentlemen with “HERO” on their helmets and “Highway Emergency Rescue Operators” on their uniforms got out. I told the first one I was having trouble figuring out how to get the jack out, and he said, “Don’t worry about it. I have a better one.” Then he got a big jack and a socket set out of his truck and started jacking up the car. Julia, who was still sitting in the driver’s seat, rolled down the window and asked if she needed to get out of the car, but he told her she was just fine and to stay put. (The flat tire was the front left one.) In the mean time, the other guy checked the pressure on the spare and then got out a small compressor and pumped it up to full pressure. They took the flat tire off, put the spare on and when I asked if I needed to do anything told me no and then got back in their trucks and drove off. I don’t think the whole thing took more than 20 minutes, and we were on our way again.

I had no idea the state provided this kind of service, but we were very grateful for it.

Affirmative action

There’s a lot of subtext around the issue of affirmative action in college admissions that isn’t being discussed by either side that I’d like to address.

The Constitution forbids the government from awarding titles of nobility. (See sections 9 and 10 of Article I.) What is a title of nobility? It is a privileged status conferred on an individual, and is invariably inheritable. Our Constitution attempts to enact a vision of a society without special classes or privileges, particularly those accruing through birth.

Of course the ideal of a classless society has never fully applied in reality. Social apes gotta “social-ape”, and there will always be status symbols and class distinctions of one form or another. For the first half or so of our country’s history, apart from invidious racial and ethnic distinctions, social class was relatively fluid and was mostly determined by wealth. However, increasingly over the past century, possession of college degrees, particularly from elite universities, has come to be one of the primary markers of high social class. Today a degree from a prestigious university has many of the functions that titles of nobility served in medieval society.

The result is that, in effect, we’ve given the people who decide who to admit and who to graduate from certain universities some of the role that the censors of ancient Rome had, in that they can determine people’s social class. This is not good. Do we really want to give a bunch of bureaucrats that kind of power? Especially when they’re evaluating people at an age when they really haven’t had the opportunity to fully reveal their character and their abilities? Unfortunately, that’s what our society has done.

A real fix would be if we’d stop putting so much prestige and power in university credentials. That’s not liable to change any time soon, though. I hope to say more about this in a future post.