Hillbillies and Ambient Pressure, Part 2

I just finished reading J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis about growing up in southern Ohio and Kentucky's Appalachia. What a great book! I learned so much about where I grew up and a group of people I never knew existed, which is bizarre if you think about it.

I didn't know any "hillbillies" growing up. I was born in Chicago and moved to Columbus when I was twelve. There are two types of people who live in Columbus: those who were born there and those who are transplants. My linguistics book in college called out my suburb of Worthington specifically as a "Yankee enclave," which it is. I have two friends with family roots in New York. People from Worthington don't sound like people from the rest of the state. What I didn't realize about Ohio was its industrial towns were made up of transplants from the Appalachia. A few of us made jokes about high school teams we'd complete against from Chillicothe in southern Ohio, but I thought it was because they were small town and we were from the big city.

Big cities have plenty of issues and complexity, but I never considered that industrial towns could have their own challenges. I always thought the collapse of small town economies had to do with Walmart moving in. Now I know otherwise.

I have a friend who might consider herself part hillbilly. The odd thing is that I never would have considered her hillbilly, as I didn't know what it meant before I read this book. Hillbillies might blend in to middle class surroundings when they move out of the holler. They might feel different, but they don't look different, and people like me might underestimate the struggles they encountered growing up. I just see her as a well read, creative and thoughtful individual, not realizing how out of place she might have been growing up.

Which brings me to my third point: J.D.'s childhood is so different from how my kids are being raised with the ambient pressure for success. J.D. grew up where he didn't know anyone who went to an Ivy League college. I can throw a rock and hit a dozen parents who attended competitive colleges. I can rattle off a bunch of couples who met at fancy colleges: Cornell, Stanford, and Michigan, not to mention a small group of people Jack and I went to college with who married other people from Northwestern. Most other people we know attended good state schools, have graduate degrees and landed great jobs.

While kids in Appalachia struggle with lack of examples of success, other kids are oppressed by too many examples. My daughter attends a high school where lots of kids attend private college after graduation. She has a friend whose sister applied to twelve very competitive schools and got into ten. She chose Duke over Brown. I told the mother my daughter looked up to her older daughter as an example of academic excellence. The mother nearly barfed. "My daughter was uptight and stressed out. There is no way she should be an example." Her father was an elite athlete who was the best in his sport for many years. He is a quiet, mild mannered guy, and you would never guess he was (is?) that big of a stud. Was he beating down his kids to be competitive? I seriously doubt it. Those who have achieved that level of success usually know they were self-driven, and that intrinsic motivation can't be taught. Still, this girl was clearly driven, and unlike the kids in Appalachia, she had dozens of people in her community supporting her goals and cheering her on. She probably had a few "holding her back," as in keeping her from falling off the edge and having a breakdown. I imagine her mother had to tell her more than once the world wasn't going to end if she got a B. The town where J.D. grew up has kids dying from drug overdoses. My daughter's high school had two suicides in the past few years. Different causes, same horrifying outcomes.

Yesterday, Jack and I met with a super nice guy from Alumni Relations from our alma mater. He said the college is working to support "first gen" kids like J.D. when they arrive on campus, teaching them to visit professors during office hours to ask questions. Likewise, for a core group of competitive colleges, one out of four students are on behavioral medication when they arrive. The Dean of the School of Engineering has to tell kids it is okay to get a B, and they can learn a lot from that.