Even Hillbillies Can Change

I just finished reading Hillbilly Eligy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance. This book was a surprise best seller a couple of years ago. It's the story of the life of J.D. Vance, a hillbilly from a poor working class region of Western Kentucky, more commonly known as Appalachia. Vance's life could have become a tragedy: drug-addicted mother married five times; constant relocations, living with men his mother barely knew and he did not know at all; family alcoholism and abuse; on and on. Apparently, this is the story of most people in that part of the country - the plight of the vast majority of the white working class there. Fortunately for Vance - and he attributes some of his fortune on his loving, but often harsh grandparents, and his wonderful older sister - he manages to crawl his way out of that mire, attend Ohio State University and eventually earn a law degree from Yale University. An outcome that just does not happen for hillbillies from Appalachia. 

It's difficult to quote from the book or offer a brief summary. While the story of his life is linear, the circumstances (especially before college) are not, more swirling and chaotic, and his thoughts about that part of his life are the same. To take an isolated quote about his thoughts on government assistance, for example, may lead one to believe that he thinks that the government cannot help the poor. But that's not his position. He realizes that government programs (like Food Stamps) do help the poor, but he also acknowledges that those same programs have hurt the poor by creating a culture of dependence and, to be frank, laziness. A major theme of his book is that individuals have to take stock of themselves, look inward for the sources of their troubles and stop blaming the world. External circumstances can change and in many cases should, but if there is no introspection, if there is no responsibility taken for individual choices, then those external changes will ultimately not change an individual's disposition and, therefore, his situation. Again, single quotations from the book do not encompass Vance's entire position, but I think this one gets to his point:

Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. 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.

Vance's focus is on the white working class - and while this sentiment may be more prevalent among his people  - they are not alone in this sentiment. This crosses over to other ethnic groups, classes, and peoples -  we all do this to some degree. And if we don't blame the government for our problems, we blame our misfortune on our family tree, schools, neighbors, the weather - everyone and everything, but ourselves. To blame ourselves would require us to attack the one monster that we don't want to fight: pride. 

While communities foster this thinking, we also do this as fallen human beings - it's in our nature. When I was taking counseling classes years ago, one of my professors would say that the seed of change is to admit that "my biggest problem is me."

While there is much to think about and learn from Vance's book, this is what I took away from it: before you start looking outside of yourself for the source of your troubles, take a good hard look at yourself. You probably won't like what you find, but confronting yourself and your troubled heart will lead to the change that will truly transform your situation and your life.