I just finished J.D Vance's
beautiful personal memoir Hillbilly Elegy.
You'll
love this book if you love stories
about self-made winners.
J .D. Vance grew up in the Rust
Belt town of Middleton in southeastern Ohio during the nineteen eighties. Vance’s family background is common to those
who identify as Hillbillies.
Predominately Scots-Irish in heritage, this uniquely American group has lived
for multiple generations throughout the Appalachians.
Hillbilly culture is centered in
the coal mining areas of West Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and eastern Kentucky
but as economic conditions have necessitated many self-proclaimed Hillbillies
have relocated for jobs into other areas of the country such as Michigan and
Ohio. For a brief time from the post World
War II nineteen fifties, sixties and seventies these areas were flush with financial
opportunity, but as manufacturing has shifted overseas in the eighties and
nineties many of the financial opportunities for the American working class
have too.
Not having progressed educationally
to take on non-manufacturing jobs, many are suffering from extreme poverty and despair
despite the fact that the overall US economy is doing well. According to Vance, feeling helpless and fatalistic,
this group seeks to blame outsiders for their problems rather than looking at
their own behaviors and attitudes emanating from Hillbilly culture as the possible
cause. Vance provides a thorough
description of the culture and provides an enlightening overview of the distinctive
attitudinal and psychological traits of those belonging to the large group of
Americans.
The circumstances of J. D’s
childhood are common for most children in his group. Despite growing up with a
drug addicted mother, who marries serially, five times from the time JD is a
baby until he is in high school, J.D is able to transcend his troubled
circumstances to serve his country as a Marine and ultimately earn a law degree
from Yale University. He credits the love and support of his
grandparents to giving him strength to resist the strong pull of apathy and
addiction experienced by his peers.
Personally It provided powerful
insight into my not so distant ancestral Hillbilly roots to help me examine some
of the psychological and socio-cultural frameworks I share with Vance that may
have undermined some of my own development as a man.
His words also helped me
recognize how fortunate I have been like Vance to have had family members some
even who died before I was born that lived their lives against the grain of the
cultural pressures predominant in Tennessee, Mississippi, Kentucky and Southern
Illinois to make lives better for hopefully many generations of us to come.
If you want to really understand
what deep bitterness is driving white Americans in the "fly-over"
states of Appalachia to be manipulated by the ilk of Donald Trump, then Vance's
memoir is a good starting place. Fatalism is the disease we need to fight in
our homes before we try to fix our schools, decrease Chinese imports or secure
the borders. Yet this book is not political. Rather it is the personal triumph
of a young man who had major obstacles to overcome related to his mother's poor
choices rooted in self destructive and self persevering Hillbilly culture.
Again I repeat you'll love this
book if you love stories about self-made winners. Thank you J.D.
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