It’s Hard To Have Compassion For People Who Hate You
By: John Devore
Tags: Streaming, Movies, Addiction, Politics, Family

Hillbilly Elegy is hard to watch because Howard’s movie doesn’t follow the usual, simplistic addiction movie formula. That formula is, basically, boy meets booze or drugs, boy loses everything, boy becomes a sober angel and lives happily ever after. The reality is staying sober is a day to day fight. I don’t mean that to sound grim because sometimes the fight is just an awareness that I’m always going to vulnerable to the promise of an easy prison break from reality and all of its responsibilities.

As Bev, Amy Adams has the thankless task of playing a junky. It’s very hard to sympathize with a junky. But she is fearless, allowing herself to be pathetic one moment, and a terrifying abuser the next, like her character’s father. The movie doesn’t tell us he’s a drinker but I’m betting he was. Addiction is often a curse handed down from one generation to the next.

I get the sense JD Vance’s book wants to blame the system for his mother’s downfall. She was, after all, at the head of her class in high school. Her only crime was having a child young. She could have succeeded if Ohio wasn’t economically depressed. The problem with this theory is that I’ve sat in AA meetings with defeated fatcats and ex-cons born broke trying to start over, both of whom had the bottle or the needle or both in common.

I’ve been to AA meetings in ‘red states’ and I can report that the recovering alcoholics I meet there are no different than the ones I know in New York City. We’re angry and unhappy and full of petty resentments. We also love jokes and stale coffee. It’s the only place other than a bar where grown men raised to bury their emotions in shallow graves are allowed to sob and I have and every time, another dude tells me it’s okay. I have so much loss inside and sometimes I feel like a condemned building that could collapse at any minute. The drunks I know in Texas tell the same story I tell: I’m happy to be sober today, I’m living life on life’s terms, I’ll pick up the phone if you call me. I will show up because we must show up for each other. Sometimes I think America needs a 12-step program.

I’m not suggesting the fatcat and the ex-con become best friends. But they know all God’s children are broken. It’s a humbling thing to learn, and relearn. The question isn’t “am I whole?” The question is “where are the cracks?”

It is a quirk of fate I am a recovering alcoholic and the only thing I can do about it is to be mindful and to own my mistakes when they happen. I know how to ask for forgiveness and how to live with not being forgiven.

Bev Vance struggles with another affliction. She is poor. To many Americans, this is the worse thing you can be. If you don’t have cash how can you buy stuff? And if you can’t buy stuff, who are you? I think we’re more forgiving of fatcats in recovery than ex-cons.

Poverty is not a moral failing and neither is alcoholism. There are policies that can lift people out of hardship. Affordable healthcare is one. There are also policies that can help millions of people who suffer from substance abuse. One idea is maybe cities should spend the tax dollars they’re currently spending on turning local law enforcement officers into heavily armed commandos on mental health professionals who can help.

The opioid epidemic is very real, as was the crack epidemic of the 80s. The only difference between the two was ethnicity and geography. These communities were flooded with cheap narcotics by cartels and pharmaceutical companies looking to make money from misery and hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Americans drowned in the process. I didn’t need help finding what I needed to get off but I can’t imagine my habit if it had been any easier to score.

What Hillbilly Elegy doesn’t really say is that the whole country has been hurting for a long time and not just the walking wounded in Ohio. The political parties spend their time divvying up America’s poor lost souls into competing teams but attention must be paid to the unique ways each member of both groups is failed by society.