Blue Collar Brilliance

I love Utne magazine. The magazine gleans its content from other internet and print sources to create a compilation of thoughts and ideas in one neat source. I read the magazine and visit it online, as well. The article catching my attention most this month is Blue Collar Brilliance. http://www.utne.com/Spirituality/Blue-Collar-Brilliance-Intelligence.aspx

The author explains how is mother "shaped her identity" as a diner waitress while he was a child. He writes about he and his father spending time at back tables waiting for her shift to end and how the shift would typically proceed. The focus in the article is not his mother, diner waitresses or him, it is the intelligence factor which is largely overlooked in the blue collar workers. He makes his point that there are well documented alternative ways to measure intelligence and that the intelligence needed to perform the tasks of the labor class is under reported and rarely recognized. The piece is not an ode to the blue collar worker, it is a reminder that we don't know everything about intelligence.

I read the article last night before I turned the lights out to sleep. I woke up thinking about it this morning. I have been a firm believer in multiple intelligences for years and am certain that we will be discovering new forms for many years to come. The author of the article points out that in the west, we depend upon verbal and mathematical skills to test IQ. I feel that we depend on these too often in assessing what a person can do and on how much that skill set is worth monetarily.

I was a waitress for several years and I can attest to the fact that there are brilliant waiters and waitresses as well as there are those in that profession which astound those around them that they can actually carry out the tasks involved in waiting tables without hurting themselves as well as others. There are food servers who are as politically astute and well read as anyone on the planet and there are many who fit a stereotype as gum smacking, ignorance spewing knuckleheads who have never had an intelligent thought on purpose in their entire lives. It doesn't take a high IQ to be a waiter or waitress, but it doesn't require a high IQ to not become one, either.

In order to prove my point, I will use doctors as the well educated, largely considered to be the epitome of intelligentsia example. I have met doctors who were seemingly brilliant and at least well read. There are doctors out there who actually know their field so well they define it and redefine it for others. They help people heal, they find new ways to introduce healing into the body, and they help to facilitate healing by getting to the root of the problem within a sick person. I have also had contact with doctors who were literally babbling idiots with little concern for humanity or little else than what they were having for lunch. There are doctors out there who never read a newspaper, book, or magazine and who amazingly enough, are well respected members of the their community simply because they had the where with all to respond well to test questions in high school and the tenacity to remain in the university community long enough to attend and graduate from medical school. It doesn't take a high IQ to become a doctor. At least, it doesn't take a high IQ when we measure IQ the way we measure them at the present time.

The Utne article is good. It is a good one for conversation over a glass of wine and it is a good one to keep in mind the next time stereotypes go flying around a room. The waitress bringing you your waffle may be a genius with a better aptitude for judging character than you. The doctor conducting your physical might be an idiot with a beanie baby collection he is counting on to fund his retirement. Be kind either way, they both may have a kid sitting at the next booth who is watching, listening and remember.