Even though it’s election season– and it’s a mid-term election that may well have dramatic consequences– and even though there have been several recent incidents of gun violence– the gun control debate seems to have completely disappeared. It’s another illustration of the sheer brutalizing stupidity of our current political culture. If we are not trying to stop the violence in our culture, what are we thinking as we prepare to vote?

There’s an apparently viable candidate for the Senate in Delaware who doesn’t “believe” in evolution, as if scientific fact were simply a mater of individual belief; a gunman shows up at my old university, swings an AK-40 around and then shoots himself; the most recent research indicates that we are now more deeply divided between rich and poor than ever before. How should these things shape our votes? Do they suggest an agenda?

I’d think that much of this suggests just how important it is to have an education system– from K-12 to graduate school– that actually teaches the importance of critical thinking. It’s the only defense against the sort of ignorance we see in O’Donnell and her ilk, as well as the absurd policies of the NRA that vilify any attempt to limit access to the most powerful weapons, and the historical short-sightedness that prevents us from really addressing inequity.

I have a very smart friend, Lisa, who once said that the best way to understand class is to think about it as where you sit on an airplane. In first class the seats are bigger, the food better, and the attendants more attentive. That’s assuming you can afford to get on the airplane at all; the bus is another world altogether. It’s also about how easily and conveniently you can get on the airplane and those special lounges at the airport. If you are very rich, of course, you have your own airplane and we’d never see you at the airport at all.

We don’t talk about class in the U.S. because we don’t have a vocabulary to talk about it and because we only get brief glimpses of the lives of people with money. Paris Hilton might be ridiculed as a party girl but she’s not reviled as too rich. Most of us don’t have our own planes, and relatively few of us can afford first class seats. If you look around a bit, though, you can learn some interesting things about privilege. Inside Higher Ed has a helpful piece this week, for example, that gives us a little peek into the hidden world of power.

As it turns out, (Legacy of Bias), the relatively well off get into college more easily. It shouldn’t be surprising– if we get on a plane we see material privilege–but it usually is. It goes against our American democratic grain to think that not everyone earns their way, just as we believe that economic failure is always a matter of individual rather than social responsibility. I wonder, though, how much research it will take before the facts of class in the United States become something like common sense.