You don't seem to be understanding that it is clearly not about one clerk. It's about the local consensus results in that clerk feeling entitled to dismiss the GPs wife and family as non-persons, as being lesser than someone born in the USA. This is something they will feel every day at every level if they live there.

Having your family members feel dehumanized in every interaction in their daily routines is not worth any amount of money if you care at all about your family when you can instead love somewhere where basic respect is the born.

Exactly. Perhaps you and your adult family can tolerate it, but think about being a child raised in such an environment. Being made to think that you are somehow a second class citizen, less than a whole person, or otherwise do not belong. That can create subconscious and ingrained trauma and self-esteem issues.

> for being, generally, useless

While I understand what you’re going for here, this feels a bit eugenics-ish to me. They are as much a human being as you are and people are capable of change. Odds are they didn’t choose to live there.

The million-dollar question that it's all about is if the locals choose to be ignorant assholes or if they don't know better because of circumstances - multigenerational bad education and ready availability of Foxnews. You'd actually say that anyone who could moved away long ago, and it's only the dregs of society that are still there.

I think people living in hard situations develop all kinds of biases and tribalism out of necessity. Cosmopolitanism is a luxury good.

If you can’t admit that you, with your own mind and morals, would act the same way in the same circumstances, that doesn’t seem any different than the bigotry you accuse ‘them’ of.

We have to disagree about the "necessity" of oppressing those who are not within your circle. Consider George Wallace, after whom streets are named in Alabama. As a young man he ran on a policy of good roads and schools, and when that didn't get him anywhere he changed strategy and had a long, successful career on a program of institutional racism. When you look at Alabama, giving the outgroup the helot treatment is either a way of life or a luxury good.

> They are as much a human being as you are and people are capable of change

Totally agree. But these attitudes towards fellow people tend to pair with unproductive behaviours.

Now, there are plenty of exceptions. Highly productive people with abhorrent views. But on average, acidic views tend to go with lower incomes at a population level. (I make no assertion on which way causation flows. And within a city, the relationship breaks down.)

> But on average, acidic views tend to go with lower incomes at a population level. (I make no assertion on which way causation flows. And within a city, the relationship breaks down.)

This is classism and itself is abhorrent. As someone who lives in NYC, living in NYC and discussing abhorrent views in red states as correlated to income sounds utterly ridiculous on its face when we have our own corrupt NYPD (Stop and frisk, the kettling and brutality on peaceful protestors), ineffective mayor, and increased gentrification leading to homelessness.

I'm absolutely baffled by "I treat living in NYC as a way to get away from lower income people and their abhorrent views" when NYC has lower income people that are actively being disenfranchised and the wealthy simply look the other way (which arguably is abhorrent!).

You'll find lots of racists, homophobes, and idiots at actual country clubs. Not sure what you're trying to argue here, class can't be purchased.

Indeed, my own family is exactly what you described here. They are affluent wealthy and nice public-facing people.

In private they hate the 'poors, blacks, queers', et al.

Boggled my mind reading gp's comment, as in my experience it's been the reverse- I had to distance myself from the wealthy part of my own family because 'the poors' have always been better people in general: more forgiving, understanding, compassionate.

If you take two cities and compare their median incomes, the one with a higher income will tend to be more tolerant.

That does not mean, within the city, the wealthy are more tolerant than the poor. It’s a system effect. When tolerant people densify, they become more productive. This might be because they can exist more compactly. Or it might be something about how interactions in a tolerant society work.

The country club analogy was solely an equivalence of cost. If I were in Tulsa, I imagine I would have to pay that much to get access to the restaurants, theatre, arts and clubs that I take for granted in New York.

> class can't be purchased.

But delusions can be purchased.

What do you do that makes you feel like you are a useful contributor to society? And how much are you paid for that?