Female Hillbilly Escapes the Heartland

Sarah Smarsh's Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth is a more poetic, even harder luck version of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, and while at times I got mired in the details I still think this is a worthwhile and important read, especially for effete liberal middle class folk like myself that can barely understand the way 60 million rural people live in our vast and economically imbalanced shitshow of a country; the image that becomes a metaphor for Smarsh's youth is when she goes to pet some half-feral kittens, though she is worried that her scent will repel the mother cat from her young: "I reached out and patted a furry head . . . the head rolled away from the small body, leaving a track of blood on the concrete floor," and her dad explains that "a possum or a fox got 'em" and gnawed all the heads off the cute little kittens; while in suburbia, we care for and protect our puppies and kittens, on the farm in Kansas, that's not the case . . . Smarsh has a true "free range" youth and she was lucky to survive it and move into the middle class; while there are moments of unadulterated fun and her parents are not stereotypical rednecks, nor are they stereotypical conservatives, she is often surrounded by drunks and addiction, violence and transience, and she has a hard time-- despite her great intelligence-- finding her educational groove; the foibles and flaws of the folks surrounding her could generally have been softened by money, but there was no money to be found and so Smarsh realizes that "I was living in an environment full of what society had recently discovered was dangerous: the smoke, the fried food, the unbuckled seat belts . . . but I didn't know the half of it: sugary diets that led to cavities, noxious glue in the walls of cheap houses, nitrates from farm runoff in our drinking water, insecticides on the wind that shimmered down from crop-dusting airplanes" and-- without the ability to move, seek healthcare or help-- that these problems have blossomed into "obesity, diabetes, meta-amphetamine addiction, and opioids overprescribed by the same doctors who were supposed to help," and Smarsh grapples with the fact, that due to shame, racism, and pride, people where she lived voted against their best interests and backed Reagan and the Republicans, who were interested in gutting environmental protections, ending the possibility of small family farms, and erasing the promise of affordable healthcare and rural school funding, and anything else that would help the people in her impoverished predicament; America-- especially the Republican party-- has shamed the poor for being poor, despite the fact that we've created a system that has incredible benefits for the winners and incredible costs for the losers, even if the losers work hard every day, so hard that their bodies disintegrate and they have no way of healing themselves; Smarsh points out that there wasn't stereotypical sexist behavior in this world; women suffered violence from drunken and broken men, but they also made the big family decisions, left when they felt like it was time to leave, did work that was just as difficult as the men, and partied as hard as the dudes . . . it's a good book and beautifully written, but it's a tough pill to swallow and the easy answer is for us economically stable folks on the coasts is to say: "they voted for this and they got what they voted for," but these policies aren't good for any of us-- there by the Grace of God goes I-- and the newest one is how the Trump administration has undervalued the social cost of carbon emissions . . . absurd, awful, and will hurt those that live close to the land and don't have the option to up and leave it more than it will hurt the rest of us.