JD Vance is the newly selected, vice-presidential running mate to Donald Trump. He’s had a very interesting background, and having read his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy, and also seeing it when it was made into a movie, I have become especially intrigued. This is because, by all accounts, JD Vance is a success story. He has achieved the American Dream. He grew up in Middletown, Ohio, which is a poor industrial city, and he had a mother who was on drugs.
JD Vance should be happy about his life because he overcame many obstacles to receive a law degree from Yale. After law school, he became a successful venture capitalist and then a US Senator. But JD Vance doesn’t seem completely satisfied with his life. Instead, he seems to be somewhat on edge and on a crusade to change things. This is because, I believe, he still feels like a poor Middletown Ohio boy.
JD Vance was surrounded by people who were marginally employed, had broken families, and were on drugs. From his memoir it was mentioned that he was definitely moving in that direction. He started hanging out with a wrong crowd in high school, and he was experimenting with drugs. His mother had long ago separated from JD’s father and had various men coming in and out of her life. While she was able to go to school to become a Nurse, she later got addicted to Opioids and eventually lost her nursing license and job.
Yet, JD Vance had a special grandmother, who was bold enough to take him in and shield him from his bad outside influences. At one point, his grandmother said, “If that boy, [who was on drugs] comes around her again, I am going to run him over with my car”. Once shielded from these bad influences, JD learned that the only way out (from Middletown, literally) was to join the military, and that is what JD did. After serving, he used his GI bill to go to Ohio State University, and later, was accepted into Yale Law School, something he could never have anticipated happening.
My situation was not nearly as difficult as JDs. My parents were both college graduates, and they could pay my way through college. But I was not the best student, and I had problems socially. Looking back, I believe that I had undiagnosed ADHD. I struggled in school and in jobs that demanded social interactions. I also got involved with a bad crowd in high school, and was headed for a life of underemployment, perhaps teenage pregnancy, drugs, who knows? My parents were at a loss for what to do.
But, like Vance, I had a way out. I always loved to read books, and I loved to write. That alone convinced me to go to college, but what would I do with those skills? I didn’t think I’d be successful in a typical business environment. I applied to the University of Iowa and was accepted even through my grades weren’t very good. I did get A’s in English classes, however, and I was able to load up on them in my final two years of high school in order to raise my grade point average. In college, I declared Psychology as a major, and every time I went to see my advisor, he told me not to major in Psychology, but instead to major in business and minor in Psychology. But I didn’t think I’d be successful in business, so I trudged on in Psychology.
When I graduated, I decided to get a Master’s Degree in Education. At that point, my luck turned around because, while in grad school, I learned about the field of Technical Writing. That is the career for me, and it is the perfect job because I basically read and write all day. I edit and simplify complicated technical content, and I meet one-on-one with Engineers and Computer programmers to fill in the gaps of content that I need for the manuals that I write.
I can’t help but feel that JD Vance must have gone through the same undefined career path that I went through. After he graduated with a Political Science Degree from Ohio State, he must have felt apprehension about his future going forward with his background and communication style from Middletown Ohio. He was miraculously accepted into Yale, and now was “one-of-the-club”. He no longer had to struggle to get ahead; he was being wined and dined by law firms wanting him to work for them. But was he really much different than the Middletown, Ohio person he grew up as? He made it to the top, but I can’t help but wonder if he, life myself, feels it was more based on luck than hard work or ability. That is where the uneasiness comes from. Rather than feeling a sense of accomplishment, it feels more like a “near death experience”, a trajectory of walking a career tightrope, where at any time, you could fall off into the abbess. He could have ended up like his mother, on drugs.
It will be interesting if Donald Trump and JD Vance win in November. If so, I can only hope they will do something to help those in this country who don’t have all the advantages to achieve their American Dream. There needs to be ways for people to successfully go forward in life without having to feel that luck has to be on their side. We all need to have real world experiences, especially starting in high school. We need to be a part of the real world before the real world is thrust upon us. This can be done through internships, apprenticeships, and other project-based learning that can give people confidence in career skills. It can also be accomplished through targeted apps that allow you to perform work in selected career fields without having to actually be there. You can check out ideas for this through my website https//learnthroughlife.com. It should never be where you started in life that dictates your future, but, instead, where your potential can take you.