J.D. Vance in 2016

[Bunmi fatoye-matory]

He wrote this in 2016 and he is now the Vice-President nominee to Trump😳😳

Opioid of the Masses 

To many, Donald Trump feels good, but he can’t fix America’s growing social and cultural crisis, and the eventual comedown will be harsh. 

By J. D. Vance JULY 4, 2016 

 A few Saturdays ago, my wife and I spent the morning volunteering at a community garden in our San Francisco neighborhood. After a few hours of casual labor, we and the other volunteers dispersed to our respective destinations: tasty brunches, day trips to wine country, art-gallery tours. It was a perfectly normal day, by San Francisco standards. That very same Saturday, in the small Ohio town where I grew up, four people overdosed on heroin. A local police lieutenant coolly summarized the banality of it all: “It’s not all that unusual for a 24-hour period here.” He was right: in Middletown, Ohio, that too is a perfectly normal day. Folks back home speak of heroin like an apocalyptic invader, something that assailed the town mysteriously and without warning. Yet the truth is that heroin crept slowly into Middletown’s families and communities—not by invasion but by invitation. Very few Americans are strangers to addiction. Shortly before I graduated from law school, I learned that my own mother lay comatose in a hospital, the consequence of an apparent heroin overdose. Yet heroin was only her latest drug of choice. Prescription opioids—“hillbilly heroin” some call it, to highlight its special appeal among white working-class folks like us—had already landed Mom in the hospital and cost our family dearly in the decade before her first taste of actual heroin. And before her own father gave up the bottle in middle age, he was a notoriously violent drunk. In our community, there has long been a large appetite to dull the pain; heroin is just the newest vehicle. Of course, the pain itself has increased in recent years, and it comes from many places. Some of it is economic, as the factories that provided many U.S. towns and cities material security have downsized or altogether ceased to exist. Some of it is aesthetic, as the storefronts that once made American towns beautiful and vibrant gave way to cash-for-gold stores and payday lenders. Some of it is domestic, as rising divorce rates reveal home lives as dependable as steel-mill jobs. Some of it is political, as Americans watch from afar while a government machine that rarely tries to speak to them, and acts in their interests even less, sputters along. And some of it is cultural, from the legitimate humiliation of losing wars fought by the nation’s children to the illegitimate sense that some fall behind only because others jump ahead. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump. During this election season, it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever. It too, promises a quick escape from life’s cares, an easy solution to the mounting social problems of U.S. communities and culture. It demands nothing and requires little more than a modest presence and maybe a few enablers. It enters minds, not through lungs or veins, but through eyes and ears, and its name is Donald Trump. Last Sunday, the day before Memorial Day, I met a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War at a local coffee shop. “I was lucky,” he told me. “At least I came home. A lot of my buddies didn’t. The thing is, the media still talks about us like we lost that war! I like to think my dead friends accomplished something.” Imagine, for that man, the vengeful joy of a Trump rally. That brief feeling of power, of defiance, of sending a message to the very political and media establishment that, for 45 years, has refused to listen. Trump brings power to those who hate their lack of it, and his message is tonic to communities that have felt nothing but decline for decades. In some ways, Trump’s large, national coalition defies easy characterization. He draws from a broad base of good people: kind folks who open their homes and hearts to people of all colors and creeds, married couples with happy homes and families who live nearby, public servants who put their lives on the line to fight fires in their communities. Not all Trump voters spend their days searching for an analgesic. Yet a common thread among Trump’s faithful, and even among those whose individual circumstances remain unspoiled, is that they hail from broken communities. These are places where good jobs are impossible to come by. Where people have lost their faith and abandoned the churches of their parents and grandparents. Where the death rates of poor white people go up even as the death rates of all other groups go down. Where too many young people spend their days stoned instead of working and learning. Many years ago, our neighbor (and my grandma’s old friend) in Middletown moved out and rented his house on a Section 8 voucher—a federal program that offers housing subsidies to low-income people. One of the first folks to move in called her landlord to report a leaky roof. By the time the landlord arrived, he discovered the woman naked on her couch. After calling him, she had started the water for a bath, gotten high, and passed out. Forget about the original leak, now much of the upstairs—including her and her children’s possessions—was completely destroyed. Not every Trump voter lives like this woman, but nearly every Trump voter knows someone who does. Though the details differ, men and women like my neighbor represent, in the aggregate, a social crisis of historic proportions. There is no group of people hurtling more quickly to social decay. No group of people fears the future more, dies with such frequency from heroin, and exposes its children to such significant domestic chaos. Not long ago, a teacher who works with at-risk youth in my hometown told me, “We’re expected to be shepherds to these children, but they’re all raised by wolves.” And those wolves are here—not coming in from Mexico, not prowling the halls of power in Washington or Wall Street—but here in ordinary American communities and families and homes. What Trump offers is an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshoring companies into submission. As he told a New Hampshire crowd—folks all too familiar with the opioid scourge—he can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. It doesn’t matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein. The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it. I’m not sure when or how that realization arrives: maybe in a few months, when Trump loses the election; maybe in a few years, when his supporters realize that even with a President Trump, their homes and families are still domestic war zones, their newspapers’ obituaries continue to fill with the names of people who died too soon, and their faith in the American Dream continues to falter. But it will come, and when it does, I hope Americans cast their gaze to those with the most power to address so many of these problems: each other. And then, perhaps the nation will trade the quick high of “Make America Great Again” for real medicine. 

J. D. Vance is the 2024 Republican vice-presidential nominee and the author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

[Olasupo Laosebikan]

I am struck by this intimate and vivid picture of Middletown/Middle America

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[cornelius...@gmail.com]

At least

don’t wanna go Biden 

must be feeling much relieved

and maybe a trifle peeved 

that Vance’s thesis about 

Middle America titled

Opioid of the Masses

doesn’t translate directly into 

The opium of the people

In which case Sleepy Joe

J. Edgar Hoover style 

would not hesitate to tar

and feather Vance as a 

“Commie” and also a friend

of Putin…

[cornelius...@gmail.com]

Many Thanks for posting this.  

It’s very insightful and shows Vance as a caring human being. When Biden goes, there are those who will say, “The evil that men do lives after them.”

The Forces Of Evil that would like to or would have liked to eliminate Donald Trump by any other means than a free and fair election, and rejoice at his demise by cold-blooded assassination (some of them (criminals) shedding a few crocodile tears, with a sanctimonious but insincere “keeping his family in their prayers”, etc), it is all such forces that are a threat to democracy.

This sounds positive :” In some ways, Trump’s large, national coalition defies easy characterization. He draws from a broad base of good people: kind folks who open their homes and hearts to people of all colors and creeds, married couples with happy homes and families who live nearby, public servants who put their lives on the line to fight fires in their communities. Not all Trump voters spend their days searching for an analgesic.”

The rest  - the impact and the aftermath of the still ongoing fentanyl epidemic in the US  - mark you, all of this still happening during Biden’s watch  and one of the proposed solutions : We must seal the border - isn’t this one of the things that Trump has been railing about?

About the rest of what Vance has previously said about Trump (comparing him to Hitler etc - I almost wrote Hillel) - maybe , we shouldn’t make too much of what a polemical thirty-one year old J.D. Vance wrote way back in July  2016 or hold his feet close to the fire because of what he or anyone else could have written or said in 2016 A.D. or B.C., such as Malcolm X referring to the assassination of JFK as “Chickens coming home to roost” , because, even with Malcolm there are several progressive phases of Malcolm the man of integrity, from early and earlier Malcolm to Malcolm the Pan-African Nationalist. So, we always have to bear in mind, especially when it comes to judging others, that some people grow you know, and as the Buddha put it  - according to his doctrine of impermanence , the only thing that we can be sure of is Change  as in A Change Is Gonna Come

And shit happens, sure, e.g.

“The change in the day 

that makes them rant and rave

Black Power! Black Power!

And the change that comes

over them at night

as they sigh and moan:

“White thighs, ooh, white thighs” (The Last Poets ) 

Just ask Saul who metamorphosed into Paul  or  Prince Hal who became Henry V or ask David Horowitz - at sometime a co-editor of Ramparts   -  Ramparts Magazine which I read regularly, starting with Susan Sontag’s Letter from Sweden  -a cross-cultural alert about what one as to what to expect over here in Sweden ( from an American perspective  - Sontag was reporting about her six-month hiatus here in Sweden ) - and of course, all the later issues of Ramparts in the early 1970s whilst the Vietnam War raged on. To many people’s consternation Horowitz moved from extreme left to  what some people today deem to be “extreme” right wing.

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

Thanks for this excerpt.

Vance also called Trump American Hitler, 

“ an idiot”,“reprehensible”, a moral disaster,” 

“a terrible candidate,”  and more.

He is now a Trump sycophant and 

Vice President nominee. 

Vance has hopefully escaped the wrath 

of narcissistic Trump for these insults. 

Let’s hope, though, that he does not in the 

long run, end up as Pence, the former

 VP who was almost burnt at the stakes. 

He is not out of the woods, as yet,

in my humble opinion. 

A narcissist has a long memory.

On a different note, Vance had at least

15 stepdads before the age of 15,

and his grand mother about 17 guns. 

Dr. Gloria Emeagwali
Professor of History/African Studies, CCSU
Chief Editor- "Africa Update"
https://sites.ccsu.edu/afstudy/archive.html
Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries
www.vimeo.com/gloriaemeagwali
www.africahistory.net
Founding Coordinator, African Studies, CCSU

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