I got a tweet from an American friend some time ago: “Try this book,” he writes. It’s a New York Times bestseller and everyone is talking about it. I’m curious to hear you compare and contrast the author’s experience in poor white America with the reality of needy communities in Scotland. He’s a good brother, so I bought the book.
& Quot; Peasant Elegy & quot; (Once Was a Dream) by JD Vance came to my door a few weeks later. I had to google the word elegy. Apparently, it is derived from the Greek work “elegus”, which means mourning song. It can also be accompanied by a flute (if you care about that kind of thing).
- I’ve never heard of it.
- And why would I go?I live in Niddrie.
- A small housing community for people in need east of Edinburgh.
- Scotland.
- A million kilometers from New York and even further.
- Socially and culturally.
- From the appalachian background of the author’s heritage.
- A book with at least one word in the title I had to google and someone I didn’t have a real connection with didn’t think it was a very good read.
- In addition.
- A visiting friend.
- Himself a productive reader and critic.
- Saw the book and said he felt indifferent about it.
- So he stayed at the kitchen table and I decided to keep reading if I had a few hours off.
After reading the book, I don’t know if it’s a review of a book or an online consultation session about self-knowledge, you see, at least for me, that it’s not just a book, not even a mourning poem. much more than that. It’s a dark complaint. A lament of such depth (and sometimes blasphemy) that he often let me travel in the mists of time to delve into memories that I thought had died with the boy I was.
“Once upon a time there was a dream? It is the story of JD Vance, a declared Scottish-Irish hick who, as he reminds us, has been blessed with
? Many good characteristics, a feeling of intense loyalty, a fierce dedication to the family and the country, but also many bad ones. We don’t like strangers or people who are different from us, whether it’s because of the difference in their appearance, how they act or, most importantly, how do they talk?(P. 3).
From the beginning I felt a deep connection to the book, which intensified as its story progressed. At other times, I would read occasional lines that resonated at all levels. He talks about his early days at work:
“Many young people resist hard work. ” With “the feeling that you have little control over your life and the will to blame everyone but yourself” (p. 7).
This could affect most social housing and social housing programmes in the UK. The problem in this country is not that there are not enough jobs, there are many. But many (not all) young people around us simply don’t want it; they prefer to sign the contract and cash the Social Security check than submit to any work they deem unworthy of them. Many of those who find work often do so, that doesn’t last more than a few weeks (maybe months) and leave, tired of being “returned. “(your words) and thinking it’s not your fault and the boss?. The victim mentality in these communities is so dense that you could spoon it in. All this and we haven’t even entered Chapter 1 yet!
Much of the book revolves around the author’s relationship with his grandparents (Mamaw and Papaw), mother, sister, and some aunts and uncles. However, it is largely Mamaw who occupies a central place in this book. Mamaw was the matriarch of the family, the League, the focal point. The anchor. There is a Mamaw in almost every household in the UK’s municipal communities and social housing. Or at least a generation ago. Mamaw, like many other members of the Scottish community, “hated disloyalty and was there not greater disloyalty than class treason? (p. 15). On almost every page of the first chapters, I felt trembling as I reflected the culture of our poorest communities here in the UK. Hearing him describe how the drug entered his community, quickly followed by an epidemic of prescription drug addiction, made me sigh with empathy. I only have to walk a few hundred yards from my house to the local pharmacy each morning to see the queues of literally hundreds of pale, anemic, and toothless ghosts, all going for their morning prescriptions for methadone, Valium, antipsychotics, and all the rest. other types of tranquilizers that they use to make themselves sleepy while slowly walking towards the grave. The “real undead” are what we call them here.
When the book began to discuss the politics of older family members (mostly Democrats), my mind went back to my childhood in a needy social housing community in the north of England. ? Papwa? Was he a Democrat because this party protected workers? (p. 35). Read? To work? that phrase and you’d have the overwhelming majority of poor voters when I was a kid. In fact, I remember voting for the Labor Party when I was eighteen and my father was very proud of me. The Labor Party was who you voted for in our context. They are fighting for the working class and the poor. Nobody voted for the Conservative Party (Tory). Margaret Thatcher was a hated figure in the north of England and throughout Scotland. Do we call her a milk thief? for ending up with free milk in schools (often my only meal as a kid). We despise him for shutting down all the mines and annihilating communities in the north of England and Scotland. So to vote for Tory, you would have to be a Southerner or a Turner. The rich voted for the conservatives and no one would vote against their own people when I grew up. I couldn’t tell you anything about the Labor Party when I voted for the first time. That was not the point. ?We? (Social Housing folks) we vote for Labor and that’s it.
One of the great pressures JD faced growing up came from the community around him. Was not going back to school from your grandfather’s time as important as working at home? Armco? (a local factory employing thousands of people) was an opportunity for many young people in the community. School was great until he got a job with the rest of his family. I remember something similar in the UK in the early 1990s. At the time, Rover was still a UK car manufacturer and one of the mottos of the local factories was ‘a job for life’. No one was referred to Rover. And if your father, uncle or cousin had a job there and were willing to recommend you, then you would almost certainly have a job in the workshop. About a decade later, that catchphrase turned out to be an unworkable concept. Thousands of people were unemployed and the Germans took over the business, forcing many to leave. This meant that thousands of young people who had received hands-on training at the workshop, but had not actually completed high school, were marginalized in their twenties and needed a way to resume their training or get back to a good education. . Many never bothered and opted for lifetime government grants, earning money through manual labor or, as the 1990s progressed, drug dealing for easy money.
JD thinks that what saved him was the incentive to read at home, he was warned to take education seriously, and to this he attributes his salvation at the beginning of his life, the opposite happened to me. I was hit for getting good grades, I had to be naked in front of strangers if I found a book in my possession (I hid them in the house or in the garden), my mother-in-law said it was to teach me not to “put ideas above my limits. “Maybe he thought he was saving me from a life of disappointment. I don’t know. I never asked her all I saw was the face of contempt and hatred when she hit me with my own textbooks and told me it would never be anything in my life.
Chapter 6 begins with this paragraph
“One of the questions that I hated and that adults always asked me was whether I had brothers or sisters. When you’re a kid, you can’t wave your hand and say, ‘Is it complicated? And move on. “So I had to take the time to guide people through the tangled web of family relationships that were common. Did I have an organic half brother and half sister that I never saw because my biological father had abandoned them for adoption? ? (P. 81).
Again, my own experience and that of many of my family, friends and neighbors are eerily similar. My father had children with other women. Some that I know and some that I’ve only heard rumors about. I have no idea of the real truth, but I have met at least four stepbrothers at some point in my life. We are not a family that has deep and meaningful conversations on these topics. Even if we did, I’m not sure the whole truth will come out. However, I know. When my father lived with the woman who raised me in the first eleven or twelve years of my life, I, along with my (real) sister, were luggage that she clearly did not want. We were poorly tolerated. When they had their own children they became favorites and rejected and treated us like second-class citizens at every opportunity. They have new clothes. They had the best food. They took the candy and the love. They could stay up late. We have been beaten, beaten, mistreated, ridiculed and humiliated. We had to fight for her and her drunken friends where the winner was saved by an adult. And growing up, I hated my stepbrothers with a murderous passion and a thirst for revenge. They were just an extension of my stepmother and her wicked brutality. They really enjoyed lying to their mother about the things we were supposed to do wrong so that they would torture us again. It wasn’t until years later, as an adult, that I thought these poor kids were being treated as badly as we are. But for years when they asked me if I had any siblings, I just said no. I am a single son. It was easier than having to explain the mess in my family life.
It was only on page 87 that JD made his first mention of religion. He asked Mamaw if God existed and she assured her that he loved and loved her. Hear how JD expresses it eloquently.
“I needed the security of deeper justice, a certain cadence, or a rhythm hidden in pain and chaos. (Page 87)
He continues to talk about his brief but manic dance with a particularly charismatic current of evangelical Christianity. The most painful phrase comes on page 96: “My new faith has put me in front of heretics. They were good friends who interpreted parts of the Bible in a different way I felt desperate for him at the time, because he seemed to be trapped in a religious institution that preached morality and divided the world between the satanic and the sacred. If it reminded me of something, it was the need to preach and teach the Bible in our churches and not our favorite cultural preferences and theological positions.
In Chapter 7, we are presented with the questionable personality of the country’s culture when another question arises about women. Does your Papaw remember it? Is a man’s measure the way he treats the women in his family? (p. 108). However, this man abused the women in his family for many years. He echoed the culture of many working-class men in the UK in this part of the book. We can slap our own wife, but if someone looks at her with “ cute, ” they will take her outside and bury her in the parking lot. Other than my father, I have never seen a woman treated with such respect during my childhood. They have been beaten, betrayed, spat on, sexually abused and even, in some cases, murdered. The neighborhood I grew up in echoed the screams and screams of couples breaking house and falling apart on a Friday night after a few drinks. But, see if the police enter the house, it doesn’t matter if the woman’s face was distorted, she was next to the man. Try telling him that you were a victim of domestic violence and that you would have laughed in his face (and probably beaten you).
His battles with his mother and his various addictions are simply painful. The fact that he is moved from place to place has left him, in his own words, “with a sense of alertness” (p. 123) What he means is that wherever he was, he was always worried. As much as he found some stability in Mamaw or, later in life with his future wife, he always hoped that everything would collapse around him. The years since the orphanage to the foster home left me feeling the same way. Years of walking through the streets resulted in the fact that when I finally found a home, with an older couple from the church I became, I didn’t unpack my suitcase for six months and slept on the floor for the first time. year because I didn’t feel very comfortable. Why would someone totally stranger help me?It took me a long time before I could get over it and see the problem again in the eyes of the guests because we, as a family, allowed a real disaster to come and share our lives.
It was when JD’s made his forays into the world of politics and poverty that the bells of intercultural recognition really began to sound loud and clear. See how, over time, he and Mamaw began to see their working class with suspicion.
“Most of us struggle to survive, but we did it by working hard and expecting a better life. But the vast majority are happy to live off unemployment insurance. Every two weeks, I would receive a small check and look at the line where federal and state taxes were deducted from my salary. Often, our drug-addicted neighbor bought steaks in Bisteca, which I myself was too poor to buy, but that Uncle Sam had forced to buy (with taxes) for someone else (p. . 139)
Therefore, JD remains convinced that the Workers’ Party?Democrats, lost millions of votes, from a previously loyal people, to the Republican Party, something that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier!One of the reasons for this, he said, was the perception that the government was,
“Pay people today who are in welfare doing nothing. Society! And everyone who works hard is ridiculed because we work every day. “
The same happened with a generation of Labor voters. We, who vote for Labor our entire lives because of our blind loyalty to our families, are stepping aside en masse. Why can’t we tolerate voting for the Conservatives? ironically more conservative than conservatives? because we are tired of the government treating us like idiots. We have people in our community who have more disposable income than I do and who still consider me “rich. ” because I work for a living and I have my own house. These same people take two vacations abroad each year, own the latest gadgets and giant flat-screen TVs, and still feel like the system owes them a debt. In the same way that the working poor in America were in deep trouble when factories and industries closed, leaving ghost towns, the working poor in the UK were in the same situation when the mining industry collapsed. it collapsed and the manufacturing industry went bankrupt. In large part, he says, “our government has fostered social decadence through the welfare state. ” (p. 144) And you know what? It’s hard not to disagree with him from a UK perspective. Five generations of this practice have left us in a mess. But questioning it, even talking about it, qualifies us as right-wing or indifferent when in reality most of us who have this problem are, historically, anyway, true Labor. But as our party no longer listens to us, we leave behind hundreds of thousands of people, and all the time the Labor Party wonders why they died in Scotland and are dying in their historic center in the north of England.
“I didn’t know all the struggles of the white working class, and when I was a kid, I didn’t know there were two different practices and different social pressures either. My grandparents incorporated a guy: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, confident, hard-working. My mother and, increasingly, the whole ward embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, suspicious?(p. 148)
Unfortunately, in our community, this older generation has disappeared, only those angry and suspicious who blame everything and everyone for all their (alleged) problems, I’m afraid that today the Mamaw in our communities are more likely to distribute Valium and Cannabis than words of wisdom. The whole problem is compounded, in JD’s mind, by widespread mistrust of the media and the current political status quo.
“We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are being manipulated against us. Can’t you believe these things and participate meaningfully in society?If you think hard work is worth it, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to make progress even when you try, why try one way or another?
It simply summed up my entire generation (and the next) in one paragraph. It’s getting worse. JD admits: “There is a cultural movement in the working class to hold society or the government accountable for its problems, and is this movement gaining supporters every day?(P. 194). Put the word immigrants and you’ll get an image of the average opinion in our social housing communities today.
The biggest problem is that society as a whole simply cannot see the problem. Despite this, it was surprisingly clear during our recent Brexit vote, when large groups of historic working-class voters clashed with the party to vote by surprise out of the European Union. The entire media riot the following day was concentrated in the racist, homophobic and xenophobic north of England (Scotland voted to stay, in large part because the poor community vote stayed at home). People from social housing communities and working-class families were portrayed as ignorant “hikers” by a dislocation of the elitist and disparaging media that claimed we were voting against the status quo. They attribute the vote to racism (true in some cases) instead of listening to the fact that we are tired of corrupt officials ordering us how to think and behave – many employees we have never voted for and over whom we have no control. The silly narrative about Northerners seems to work better than confronting the harsh truths that we feel betrayed by politicians to whom we once attributed our unwavering and unquestionable loyalty. It’s no wonder Donald Trump eliminates the poor white vote in the utter desperation of the current political system. What’s worse is that the talkative elite (including influential evangelicals) who demonize and denigrate Trump voters do not convince them, but marginalize them even more. (That’s not to say that their electoral practices are fair or shouldn’t be questioned, but it does offer a bit more empathy for some of the mindsets behind these political fluctuations. )
The real blow to this book comes in the final chapters, when JD evaluates his life, his family’s influences, and his cultural heritage. His discussion of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) led me to google again when I took the ACE online test to find out my score and see if I qualified as someone who had suffered acute childhood trauma. I got 9 out of 10 points (the author got six, his aunt 7). It was a depressing result, but not surprising. Your score and mine have made me review old education and training problems.
“How much of our lives, good or bad, should we attribute to our personal choices, and what is the legacy of our culture, our families, and our parents who have let their children down?(P. 231)
Wherever you become aware of it, I agree with JD, who unequivocally states that,
“No one in childhood gives him a perpetual moral letter so as not to go to jail” (p. 232).
We have to take some responsibility for how we behave and act like adults, that’s for sure. At this point in the book, I found my mind wandering. Let’s go back to the boy he was. Locked in a closet, scared and alone. Hungry, disfigured and unfaithful in the world. I didn’t have the Mamaw that JD had. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t have been in jail, maybe I wouldn’t have lost ten years of my life, bitter and following a self-destructive path.
But I didn’t have a Mamaw, I didn’t even have a mother, I haven’t had a single adult in my life who told me she loves me, I never heard those words from a father. I’ll never hear this book make me rething. He made me aspire to a life I’ll never have. Listen to words I’ll never hear. The best thing I can do is watch my wife kiss our children and tell them how much she loves them. Sometimes I find myself looking at her with them and wondering what it’s like to be loved like that. Of course, my wife loves me. My daughters love me. But it’s not the same, is it? Feeling like your parents love you must be a really wonderful thing. The real pain comes when I see the kids in my neighborhood going through the same thing. So I think about it multiplied by the nation, everyone this causes a lot of pain. This leads to much silence, to many voids in many young hearts.
Towards the end, he proposes to rediscover the Christian faith that he lost so many years ago. Dating in a tempting way, but never comes back. It is just a lost phrase in the words of your book. But I realized. I hope JD finds the real peace that knowing Jesus can bring. It is greater than the love of a woman and her children. It is a deep and moving peace that cannot be adequately expressed in words. You see, I’m alive today because of Jesus. My wife was not beaten, criticized or mistreated. My children have not been neglected or abused. They know security and stability. They know all these things because Jesus saved my soul almost twenty years ago. Without him, I would be just another homeless man, living on the streets, drugged up to my neck, blaming my life at home, the world, the government and the rich for all my troubles and woes. Instead, I accepted the imperfections of our world (and my creation) and gave myself completely to whoever says they love me. I often doubt it. I often feel like I’m on the alert in case I take that love away from someone so unworthy. And I fight with all my might to believe in the truth that I am his forever.
This book will stay with me for a long time, but not for the reasons many like (or hate). Bewitching and fascinating. It may not agree with your social science policy or application, but it’s a colossal book.