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by
J.D. Vance
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February 12 - February 25, 2025
that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.
It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.
There is a lack of agency here—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.
“There is nothing lower than the poor stealing from the poor. It’s hard enough as it is. We sure as hell don’t need to make it even harder on each other.”
avoidance and wishful-thinking forms of coping “significantly predicted resiliency” among Appalachian teens. Their paper suggests that hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.
We tend to overstate and to understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves.
I never understood where this sentiment came from—whether she herself was abused as a child, perhaps, or whether she just regretted that her childhood had ended so abruptly.
“Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them,” my grandma often told me. “You can do anything you want to.”
The costs of moving are so high that many people stay put.
In other words, despite all of the environmental pressures from my neighborhood and community, I received a different message at home. And that just might have saved me.
I had to work hard. I had to take care of my family because Christian duty demanded it. I needed to forgive, not just for my mother’s sake but for my own. I should never despair, for God had a plan.
There were two kinds of people: those whom I’d behave around because I wanted to impress them and those whom I’d behave around to avoid embarrassing myself.
Lindsay was a teenager when Papaw died, at the height of that weird mixture of thinking you know everything and caring too much about how others perceive you.
Research does reveal a genetic disposition to substance abuse, but those who believe their addiction is a disease show less of an inclination to resist it.
As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”
I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.
I’d get a small paycheck 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,
single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.
There was always a safe place and a loving embrace if ever I needed it.
and no one’s romantic decisions affected my life. And out of that happiness came so many of the opportunities I’ve had for the past twelve years.
The trials of my youth instilled a debilitating self-doubt. Instead of congratulating myself on having overcome some obstacles, I worried that I’d be overcome by the next ones.
But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself—that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability.
Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities.
His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.
From multiple Internet sources, suggestions that Obama will soon implement martial law in order to secure power for a third presidential term.
If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all?
There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.
What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.
Unfortunately, the fight-or-flight response is a destructive constant companion. As Dr. Nadine Burke Harris put it, the response is great “if you’re in a forest and there’s a bear. The problem is when that bear comes home from the bar every night.” When that happens, the Harvard researchers found, the sector of the brain that deals with highly stressful situations takes over. “Significant stress in early childhood,” they write, “ . . . result[s] in a hyperresponsive or chronically activated physiologic stress response, along with increased potential for fear and anxiety.” For kids like me, the
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The things I wanted most in the entire world—a happy partner and a happy home—required constant mental focus. My self-image was bitterness masquerading as arrogance.
How much of our lives, good and bad, should we credit to our personal decisions, and how much is just the inheritance of our culture, our families, and our parents who have failed their children?
No person’s childhood gives him or her a perpetual moral get-out-of-jail-free card—not
As the liberal senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.”
And despite all of my reservations about Donald Trump (I ended up voting third party), there were parts of his candidacy that really spoke to me: from his disdain for the “elites” and criticism of foreign policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan to his recognition that the Republican Party had done too little for its increasingly working- and middle-class base.
