The Omni Syndrome

            In today's society, there exists a universally accepted belief that America is classless. We choose to believe that social distance is unreal and that any gaps between "us" and "them" exist because of personal reasons; socioeconomic ones do not play a role. This false notion that the "middle" is almost limitlessly encompassing is known as the Omni Syndrome. DeMott criticizes this concept that everyone has equal access to a society that is fluid and full of social mobility. He emphasizes that we need to acknowledge the class differences that exist in our society and work to understand their effects, rather than pretend that we are all similar individuals belonging to the same all-encompassing middle class.
          I believe my high school's community outreach program is a perfect example of the Omni Syndrome's effect on our perceptions of others. During my four years at the school, we were required to fulfill a certain number of community service hours at a non-profit location. As freshmen, we were piled onto buses and sent to low-income daycares or schools to help tutor and interact with the children. Coming from a mostly Caucasian school, we were all shocked to walk into a classroom and see only black and Hispanic children. The children all spoke in different ways than we did and sometimes we could not understand the slang they used or the way they pronounced their words. Because my classmates and I had all grown up interacting only with those of the same socioeconomic class, we had come to believe that class was inexistent, so it was hard for us to understand the children we were supposed to be helping. Their family situations were much different than ours, more unpredictable and unstable, and we were unprepared to deal with these glaring differences. As DeMott described, the culture of poverty causes the lower class to be shut out of mainstream society and to be easily overlooked. Because of their isolation from us and what I perceived to be the easily-accesible middle class, I had not experienced any inter-class interactions before. Therefore, I was not prepared to come face-to-face with actual differences rooted in class, barriers, and impositions, rather than differences existing of one's personal characteristics, like character and intelligence, which I had originally thought were the only distinctions between the "poor" and the "rich".
         While I had originally believed that lower class persons could easily scale the social ladder if they so chose to, but they simply had not bothered to, I realized from hearing these children's stories that the Omni Syndrome is a myth. There are many other factors beyond one's individual drive to succeed that play a role in social mobility and we do not, in fact, all coexist in the same middle class. As we fulfilled our community service and became more aware of our country's social inequality, many students struggled with not knowing who to blame- the actual people or the system itself? Class is a touchy subject in America and it is difficult to recognize the true effects of barriers and to understand the shaping of class without blaming people that are different from us and criticizing their values. Because we are afraid to get past the mythology of what class is and is not, and to acknowledge the differences that exist, the Omni Syndrome remains an accepted belief in our society: an inaccurate proclamation that we are all fundamentally the same.