American - Author | August 2, 1984 -
I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.
J. D. Vance
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Every two weeks, I'd get a small pay-check and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.
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For decades, scholars have studied the ways in which implicit biases affect how we perceive other people in this multiethnic society of ours. The data consistently shows that about 90 percent of us possess some implicit prejudices - and, unsurprisingly, people typically favor their own group.
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We must have the courage to confront dreadful views even in the people we love the most. But that's difficult to do when we cast large segments of our fellow citizens into a basket to be condemned and disparaged, judging them even as we ignore that many of their deplorable traits exist in us, too.
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Recently, a friend sent me the online musings of a televangelist who advised his thousands of followers that the Federal Reserve achieved satanic ends by manipulating the world's money supply. Paranoia has replaced piety.
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Mr. Trump, like too much of the church, offers little more than an excuse to project complex problems onto simple villains. Yet the white working class needs neither more finger-pointing nor more fiery sermons.
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My family has existed in eastern Kentucky for as long as there are records. If you're familiar with the famous Hatfield-McCoy family feud back in the 1860s, '70s and '80s in the United States, my family was an integral part of that.
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My grandma would say if someone else calls you a hillbilly, you might need to punch them in the nose. But if we call ourselves hillbillies, it's a sort of a term of endearment, something that we have co-opted.
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I believe that I'm a hillbilly in my values and in my attitudes, and I don't want to lose that. I think it's possible to maintain a big chunk of that identity so long as you're self-reflective and meaningful about it.
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We are so isolated in our own little worlds, in our own little geographies, that it's pretty hard to understand where someone else is coming from. And so I think that we have to really think about what that means as a country and, frankly, whether this segregation that we have is durable over the long run.
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Folks like me have to feel a little indebted to the communities that they came from. And if they do, I think we'll start to see a little bit more of a geographic integration in the country because people will start to think, 'You know what? I owe that place something, and I should return to it in one form or another.'
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Solutions are complex, and I continue to worry that Trump didn't fully appreciate the complexity of what's going on. Consequently, I worry about whether he's going to make the problems a whole lot better... But I am a Republican, and we really should give the guy a chance to govern and hope he's successful.
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