A Wall of Criticism

My book club chose Hillbilly Elegy this month, and consequently, I've been reading it.  Although the book has been on the New York Times Bestsellers list for 29 weeks, it soared to Number One after the election and has been described as one of six books to help understand Trump's win of the U.S. presidency.

While I would like help getting my head around that victory, I've resisted the book since it came out early last year and began getting a lot of press coverage.  I am not sure it has been a conscious resistance; it just hasn't appealed to me for some reason.  I put off starting the read until I'd finished my final exam, so now with the club meeting just 10 days away, I finally sat down with it.

I was surprised to learn that the focal point for the book is Middletown, Ohio, a small city in which I worked for a couple years in my early twenties.  At first, I thought its portrayal was inaccurate, but then I reminded myself that the author was writing about the city at least two decades after I left it. The more I read, the more uncomfortable I became.

What author J.D. Vance labels as "hillbillies" were what we called "back-homers" when I lived there. On Friday afternoons, all the bridges across the Ohio River from both Indiana and Ohio would be jammed for miles and miles with the Kentucky hill people, who had come to the industrial midwest for jobs, going home for the weekends.  Then there was something called the Monday flu that they seemed to get in all four seasons, when they would call in sick on Monday morning to grab an extra day "back home;" thus, the name "back-homers."

My father's family were not hill people, but he did come from Kentucky, and I grew up amidst criticism of these "irresponsible" behaviors.  While the behaviors that Vance describes were mostly arm's length from my own personal experience, at least in part because of the generation between my tenure in Middletown and the time about which Vance writes, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with some trickle-out effects that I did experience as a child, growing into adulthood in that part of the country.

Vance describes a distrust of "outsiders," and while he doesn't use the term, what I experienced that was similar was what I will call vigilant criticism.  The distrust part is that for some unidentifiable reason, it was assumed that everyone outside the nuclear family not only didn't want us to succeed but intentionally set us up for failure.  The consequence in my case was that I was taught the need to be hypercritical, allowing me to anticipate and compensate for any metaphorical landmine that might explode in my face.

My personality type is one that is prone to demonstrating competence, so when coupled with this hypervigilance, I became very good at anticipating any possible problem and finding every flaw. Those qualities served me well in my career.  Every boss or client I have ever had knew that if they put me in charge, they would get an excellent event or product.

The downside, however, has been that I don't trust easily, and that I am always looking for a flaw, even when there may not been one, or, heaven forbid, that a flaw might be of no consequence.

Vance clawed his way up through poverty, drug and child abuse, and eventually made his way to Yale Law School, where he describes a secret code or barrier perceived by him to be designed by the upper crust almost with intention to stop those of us on the "outside" from getting in. The result as he described it, and I experienced it, is that we put up the barriers because we think others are "outsiders," not be be trusted.

While my ability to be critical served me well in my career, I am certain that it hasn't served me well in life, and I don't think I knew that until this afternoon.  As I read Vance's description of not trusting outsiders, tears ran down my cheeks because it just felt too close to my own experience.  I've used my criticism of others to build a wall between me and others.  I think few have penetrated it.

I started out the year by pledging that the next stage of my spiritual growth would be the fun stuff, but today didn't feel much like fun.  There was a lot of sadness about the people that I've probably shut out because I couldn't trust them, not because they weren't worthy of trust but I was literally incapable of trust. Others must have felt that they could never get things perfect enough to pass my scrutiny. In keeping with my pledge, I expect that this lesson, and possibly/probably more to come, has been one that will allow me knock down the wall of criticism and let others in, and that is a spiritual lesson to which I look forward.