Everything I know about promotion, bias, and lies I learned from television ads. The pain reliever that claims to alleviate most headaches when taken with a glass of water? My dad pointed out way back in the 1950s that most headaches are caused by dehydration. They only needed the water. My dad taught me habits of skepticism that have served me well throughout my life. I question everything, consider the angles of possible deception, and sometimes I see right through the pitch while only half trying.

Years ago, an educator handed me the new biography, Three Cups of Tea, and assured me it was better than Mountains Beyond Mountains. I had been teaching Pulitzer-winner Tracy Kidder’s book about Dr. Paul Farmer’s campaign to serve the poor in Haiti and elsewhere. Could this memoir be better?

In a word: no.

Right at the beginning, I didn’t like the tone of Three Cups of Tea. The author fawns over his subject, who is an unemployed sport mountain-climber seemingly willing to say or do whatever it took to get to his preferred recreation. By contrast, Kidder is skeptical of Farmer through several chapters, raising all the questions I might have and ultimately quashing his skepticism and my own. He considers the paradox of a man who sleeps on a church cot for half the year but enjoys being upgraded to first class when he flies to Haiti… to sleep on another cot.

In my copy of Three Cups of Tea, there was a Christmas-card greeting photo of Mortenson and his wife holding military-style rifles. I’d flipped through the book because I didn’t trust the author, and looked at that photo for a long time, trying to reconcile the rifles with education of poor girls in the Himalayas. Mortenson’s claims about the particular need to educate girls because girls are more likely than boys to remain supportive of their communities was not news to me. Boys move away to the city, marry and raise big families. Girls stay nearby, wait to have a family and invest in their communities. I’d read those studies based on West African communities years before. Mortenson claimed to be building schools. Somehow I didn’t believe him. I didn’t trust him.

Eventually, it all came out. The schools that existed only on paper. The lavish lifestyle underwritten by people who thought they were helping others but found their funds only went to one person. Between 60 Minutes and Jon Krakauer (who wrote an entire book exposing the con), the charity he promoted with such charm is revealed as a fake. Mortenson was in it for the money, and while that seemed obvious to me almost immediately [thank you, Daddy], charm sometimes gets its way regardless.

And then it happened again. Another educator handed me J.D. Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy. I argued with that one too.

Rags to riches is the Great American Dream, but it should be pointed out how seldom that dream is achieved. Studies find that Americans almost never rise from genuine poverty to wealth. Rich to Richer is the more common pattern. Vance’s background was never quite “rags” any more than former President Obama’s was. Despite the much-emphasized poor single parent, Obama had that very rich grandparent, never had to attend public school in Hawaii, was never hungry or without support.

What Obama did that Vance fails to do is choose to make something better for other people. Obama did not give himself all the credit for his success but recognized how the help he’d received allowed him to pursue a bright future. He did not blame the poor for their poverty. It is Vance who does that. Girls who were raped, fooled, became pregnant, and had to drop out of school? No pity from Vance. His empathy is limited to himself, and he fails to find compassion for the failures and misfortunes of others. He had his own problems and seems never to appreciate the problems others face.

The writing in Hillbilly Elegy isn’t anything special, but the story seemed credible and emotionally compelling at first. Vance grew up in a violent, loud, drug-afflicted, under-educated, and sometimes poor household, but he had people who genuinely loved him and cared for him, even if those people had their flaws and were not necessarily his parents. He had people who fought for him. They fought hard. I love the quote from a teacher at his former high school: “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.” And then . . . 

I began to consider stories I know best from my own family and from teaching in public schools. 

My husband was raised poor in a family that did not take charity. His family bought “day old” bread from an outlet when he was little, and he picked the mold off his sandwich in the lunchroom, trying not to be seen doing it. He sat on the porch waiting for his dad to get home on payday because there was no food in the house beyond scraped jars of condiments. His experience of poverty is not unique, and it didn’t happen in Kentucky or Ohio, but in Arizona and Washington State. One side of his family was “Swedes” from Seattle and the other was Dust Bowl Scots-Irish share croppers from Oklahoma, so many children orphaned when their mother died and Poppie gave them away. 

No one in his family intervened or encouraged him to make something of himself. Vietnam was raging and his hair was long enough to touch his collar at a time when that could get boys kicked out of school. In the years between high school and college when no one wanted to hire him, he had three pieces of luck. He was granted a draft deferment based on his glasses that eventually became permanent, he began working at the University Book Store where he was exposed to new people and ideas, and he met me. [I had my own luck, which includes meeting Gary at Edmonds Unitarian Church when pastor and future author Robert Fulghum was writing his homily that would later become a bestseller, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.] When I graduated from high school, Gary went to college because I was going to college. My husband graduated from high school with a C average but he was Phi Beta Kappa when he graduated from the University of Washington four years later. Like Vance, he saw no point in pajamas and is still in a perpetual state of what others term catastrophizing. Christmas was fraught when I met him but has become a good holiday he looks forward to. He loves his cotton jersey pajamas. 

From the LA Times: “As Vance puts it at the beginning of this American dream memoir, he has done nothing ‘extraordinary.’ So what’s wrong with all those other hillbillies? In suggesting that his own success in Silicon Valley was a matter of refusing cinnamon rolls, Vance is giving us a basis in feeling for the devastating policy Ben Carson [recall how his “governing principle at HUD is to take whatever the Obama administration was doing, and do the opposite”?] wants to enact. People are poor because they deserve to be. And there it is: Trump-era elitism defined.” People are poor because they deserve to be poor? What a cruel, unreasonable, and dare I say it, unChristian philosophy.

Some people abuse the system, and some people are too proud to accept help, even for their children. When my husband was given a sweater by his Sunday school teacher Mr. Hamilton because his second-hand store clothing was too poor for church and too sad to ignore, it was only because his mother won the argument with his father that he was allowed to keep it. It was the nicest item of clothing he ever owned as a child. “White trash” is a filthy expression in my home, equivalent to a racist epithet. “Red neck” was the term I was taught as a child. I would not use it today. Change is not easy, but we are capable of change. 

In my forty-year experience working with students, I witnessed most all parents doing the absolute best they knew how. Seemingly neglectful poor parents did not love their children any less than neglectful affluent parents, but the results tend to be more public among the poor. Poor people have no one to back them when they make a mistake and are less skillful at concealing problems because they do not have the money to hide behind. Some parents worked too many jobs just to get by. I think of a single parent who could not ensure his child did his homework because he got off work from his second job in the middle of the night to find his teenager drinking soda and playing video games while waiting up for him instead of sleeping.

Affluent families have their own troubles involving drugs and mental health, abuse and time. Even in my poor, rural community, some entitled parents sent their children to elite private schools. Some could afford private lessons and tutors and vacations their peers could not even imagine. Their students drove cars and trucks worth twice the average local yearly income. Affluent parents may not need to work two or three jobs to pay rent, but sometimes they worked long hours or ignored their children because they chose to do other things than parenting or they, like other parents were doing the best they could and for whatever reason it wasn’t enough. All parents must lie awake at night sometimes wondering if they can ever do enough for their children.

I think about the student who was sleeping in a shed because her mentally unstable mother could not maintain housing. I think of the brilliant girl who said she would never go away to college because her family needed her to stay close; she was what held things together. Those girls did the best they could for their families, and maybe they had less luck, but they didn’t blame anyone. No one should blame them for putting their family first.

The presenter at an in-service about poverty told a room full of teachers we needed to teach children in poverty not to share good fortune but to be more selfish. A presenter at an education conference told a couple of hundred English teachers we needed to stop trying to teach them all. “Find the bankable kids and just focus on them.” I stopped him outside the venue and told him he was wrong. “You don’t know who is ‘bankable’ and neither do I. We do not have the right to assume we know. I’ve taught for a long time. Kids will surprise you.” He said he would remember what I told him, but I wonder.

Things go horribly wrong for children, dreadful things happen to them, but in my experience, most often when things go wrong with children—pregnancy, drinking, drugs, crime, dropping out—the causes are not simple. The causes are not easily pinned on genetics, politics, poverty, public education, parenting, or an unwillingness to work hard. It’s a combination of bad luck and something inexplicable going wrong. It isn’t the child’s fault—in some way, the child had the worst luck possible, or what for that child in that particular circumstance was the devil’s triangle of happenstance.

In his memoir, Vance details the unintended teenage pregnancies causing moves and marriages and monstrous errors beginning with Vance’s Mamaw when she was too young to drive. Pregnancy seems to be the particular curse of Vance’s family, and yet he reflects on this only in passing, perhaps because as a boy it did not hit him personally. 

Vance works hard not to blame the people he loved, even sparing the people who damaged his life, but he is also specific and detailed in itemizing the chaos, abuses, insults, and injuries inflicted upon himself and he repeats the lists every few chapters to ensure readers do not miss the hardships he suffered as if no one else was suffering too. Still, this book is lived truth, and if Vance fails to recognize the irony of complaining that a single call to child services fails to net any interference in a neighbor’s neglect of her children and then complaining a handful of pages later about child services “prying” into his own messy family . . . well, it’s fair to ask if has he earned that right? I wish he allowed the same compassion for the people who did not have his luck that extended family and teachers and gender afforded him. We are nothing if not an inconsistent species, and he demonstrates this by making excuses for some while blaming others in the same or worse circumstances.

There is no easy answer to the problems we face in America, but I think we could do better as a nation for our children, regardless of who is at fault for their troubles. An equitable public education, a reliable health care, a decent diet, and a nation caring enough to inconvenience itself would go a long way toward making the lives of all American children better. It would give us all a better future.

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COVID

Despite my intention to wait till March, I ran an experimental mile this past Friday and ran my regular Sunday mile this morning. My resting heart rate is back to 58. I would like to believe my blood pressure is down too, but I haven’t tested since early this month. My feet hurt. Otherwise, I feel pretty good. In Gary’s terms, I might be 85% or even 95%. Gary says he’s “pretty much back.”