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blackcatranch 's review for:
Wow, what a great read! It makes me almost happy that I was fighting off a miserable cold this weekend because that gave me the space to read through JD Vance's incredibly sensitive, well-written, poignant and mature memoir of a difficult childhood.
So many of the things in this story reminded me of incidents in my childhood and stories told by my maternal family -- that I even looked up my maternal grandfather's home town in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town and realized for the first time that he was born and raised in Appalachia. I guess that accounts for the handguns and the story about front porch homicides (one neighbor made advances on his neighbor's wife, then shot that husband, and in turn was shot by a vengeful brother who ran off to the Merchant Marines or something). Anyway, I digress.
This story is not really about "why poor white people voted for Trump." But it is about the difficulty of pulling families out of poverty because of a lack of models and experience. Addiction and worldview have their place here, too. Like JD, I was forced to grow up young and parent my parents -(I score a 6 on the ACE test, FYI).
Even though my mother moved us to a suburb and remarried - my stepdad was disabled and we weren't really able to access middle class benefits despite being surrounded by many people much better off than we were.
As the author points out -- having mentors and outsiders with experience to provide feedback, guidance and to balance out the less than productive learned behaviors is critical to that upward mobility. If people just work hard -- but they don't learn the other skills necessary to upward mobility -- then they learn that working hard doesn't get you ahead, so "why bother?"
That's the biggest part of the problem with the folks stuck in the "culture of poverty" -- a lack of access to resources and positive models. I was always told that I would go to college by my mom - but had no idea how to get there. Even my high school guidance counselor had internalized class prejudices and excluded me from the process for college application process my senior year of high school instead of (and refused my request to take photography class because she assumed I couldn't pay for materials).
How do we put the right information and opportunities in the hands of those who need it? And, how do you ensure that they have the right support network to keep them from slipping back into those bad patterns?
As JD Vance says - the path to success is to get out of that environment. Nobody who stayed in Middletown was successful. The "brain drain" is key to breaking those patterns - and perhaps just as important is for those who have broken the cycle to return to provide better models and examples for the communities they have left behind.
So many of the things in this story reminded me of incidents in my childhood and stories told by my maternal family -- that I even looked up my maternal grandfather's home town in a Pennsylvania coal-mining town and realized for the first time that he was born and raised in Appalachia. I guess that accounts for the handguns and the story about front porch homicides (one neighbor made advances on his neighbor's wife, then shot that husband, and in turn was shot by a vengeful brother who ran off to the Merchant Marines or something). Anyway, I digress.
This story is not really about "why poor white people voted for Trump." But it is about the difficulty of pulling families out of poverty because of a lack of models and experience. Addiction and worldview have their place here, too. Like JD, I was forced to grow up young and parent my parents -(I score a 6 on the ACE test, FYI).
Even though my mother moved us to a suburb and remarried - my stepdad was disabled and we weren't really able to access middle class benefits despite being surrounded by many people much better off than we were.
As the author points out -- having mentors and outsiders with experience to provide feedback, guidance and to balance out the less than productive learned behaviors is critical to that upward mobility. If people just work hard -- but they don't learn the other skills necessary to upward mobility -- then they learn that working hard doesn't get you ahead, so "why bother?"
That's the biggest part of the problem with the folks stuck in the "culture of poverty" -- a lack of access to resources and positive models. I was always told that I would go to college by my mom - but had no idea how to get there. Even my high school guidance counselor had internalized class prejudices and excluded me from the process for college application process my senior year of high school instead of (and refused my request to take photography class because she assumed I couldn't pay for materials).
How do we put the right information and opportunities in the hands of those who need it? And, how do you ensure that they have the right support network to keep them from slipping back into those bad patterns?
As JD Vance says - the path to success is to get out of that environment. Nobody who stayed in Middletown was successful. The "brain drain" is key to breaking those patterns - and perhaps just as important is for those who have broken the cycle to return to provide better models and examples for the communities they have left behind.