从Appalachia山走到俄亥俄州中部的平原,从偏僻的农场走向大型钢厂(祖父),从一个平民百姓的孩子跻身到藤校法学院,这无疑都是一个向上向前的流动。它开拓了人的视野,给人注入新能量,新信息,从而激发了人的潜能。但是,这些被大山养育的人群虽然离开了家乡,身上又带着那里的烙印 (You can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you can’t take Kentucky out of the boy. (P. 41))。他们游离于两种文化间,在他们一只脚踏入新领域,新环境时,另一只脚却停留在旧文化旧观念旧习俗里。 书中提到,这些来自Appalachia山脉的居民,他们怀念家乡的风土人情,抱团生活在自己小圈子里,固守着自己的文化和生活方式,很难融入或彻底投身到当地居民的生活中,是当地人眼中的异类。这种难以割舍的情怀让他们频繁地奔波在连接他乡和故乡的高速公路上,他们在得到经济状况改善的同时,又是有失落,迷茫的。这种剥离蜕变,破茧成蝶的过程或许很痛苦,但是社会不就是在一次次的阵痛中向前的吗?
作者在书里提到,很多时候山里人就等同于穷人(Jackson taught me that “hill people” and “poor people” usually meant the same thing.)像作者这么成功的人士在他的人群里是少数,大多数山里人,即便走出了大山,依然挣扎在社会边缘。他们没有工作,吸毒成瘾,犯法,孩子辍学在外游荡,未真正成年就是好几个孩子的父母。这些问题的解决非一朝一日,任重而道远。如果说这本传记《山里人的挽歌》是作者对孩提时代大山生活的一种纪念,是献给外祖父外祖母和那个群体的一曲挽歌,那么他自身的故事,经历和成功又何尝不是在传递着一种自强不息的精神,给挣扎中的人们带来挑战命运的信心呢?
最近学唱了一首歌《陪你一起看草原》,附在下面,感谢来听我唱歌的朋友!
书的摘抄:
It is full of drug addicts and at least one man who can find the time to make eight children but can’t find the time to support them. P35
They always had one foot in the new life and one foot in the old one.
Your will make its living with their minds, not their hands.
You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness. (p86)
To them, the American Dream required forward momentum. Manual labor was honorable work, but it was their generation’s work—we had to do something different. To move up was to move on. That required going to college.
For my entire life, I had oscillated between fear at my worst moments and a sense of safety and stability at my best.
Working as a cashier turned me into an amateur sociologist. A frenetic stress animated so many of our customers. One of our neighbors would walk in and yell at me for the smallest of transgressions—not smiling at her, or bagging the groceries too heavy one day or too light the next. Some came into the store in a hurry, pacing between aisles, looking frantically for a particular item. But others waded through the aisles deliberately, carefully marking each item off of their list.
Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation. … government was “payin” people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re getting’ laughed at for workin’ every day! (p204)
“I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.” (p205)
The problems of our community hit close to home. Mom’s s struggles weren’t some isolated incident. They were replicated, replayed, and relived by many of the people who, like us, had moved hundreds of miles in search of a better life. There was no end in sight. Mamaw had thought she escaped the poverty of the hills, but the poverty—emotional, if not financial—had followed her. Something had made her later years eerily similar to her earliest ones. (p207)
As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could—generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected—left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged”—unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support.
Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in the inner cities….. – which addressed the way our government encouraged social decay through the welfare state. (p210)
It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith. (p210)
Like my professor who suggested that Yale Law School shouldn’t accept applicants from non-prestigious state schools. There’s no way to quantify how these attitudes affect the working class. We do know that working class Americans aren’t just less likely to climb the economic ladder, they’re also more likely to fall off even after they’ve reached the top. (P297)
Though we sing the praises of social mobility, it has it downsides. The term necessarily implies a sort of movement—to a theoretically better life, yes, but also away from something. And you can’t always control the parts of your old life from which you drift. (p298)
At the same time, they’ve shown me that social mobility isn’t just about money and economics; it’s about a lifestyle change. The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. (p298)
暖冬cool夏 发表评论于
回复 '野性de思维' 的评论 : 谢谢维兄再次临帖!可不是嘛,人生苦短,又有多少乐趣呢。我现在对工作的要求低到能保住饭碗便好。最近股市不错,尤其是nasdaq,涨得厉害,我守不住卖低了,现在也是在等机会,告诉自己要耐心。据说Warren is very good at doing nothing. 大有以不变应万变的味道。
祝维兄股市发达,也希望我们都能早日实现财务自由(维兄已经实现了,so I mean, 更大的自由:)!
回复 '舒啸' 的评论 : 舒兄好! 舒兄这里讲的几乎也是书中所描述的,作者的外祖父就是在当地最大的钢铁厂,这些从Appalachia山移居出来的人都是进了这家工厂做工,工厂工资高,福利好,很有退休金,所以后来的并购让很多人失业了。外祖父已经意识到了问题的根本,告诉作者的就是那句话,Your will make its living with their minds, not their hands.(不知道原文里为什么不是your minds,your hands)
所以舒兄想说的是globalization的冲击无疑是负主要责任的。也就是说,美国人的相对高劳动力,低效率在全球是没有太多竞争力的。不过这个话题也是很大。你说对了,这些铁锈带的人从支持民主党到支持共和党,其中与他们自身利益的变化有关。谢谢舒兄临帖和你的看法,周末快乐!
这是去年看过的电影中印象很深的一部,看后有许多感慨。暖冬总结得非常全面,我也不添足了。想想这些年我对美国社会最不理解的就是暖冬摘录的这一段:
“I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money". 这样的福利制度,不但养了懒人,更是害了本来可以靠努力而脱贫的人。所以我也更敬佩那些挣着最低工资却努力工作的人,要拒绝随手可及的福利而选择辛苦又收入低的工作,需要多大的勇气呀!
回复 '林向田' 的评论 : 林兄好!是的,是Rust Belt Ohio的故事和问题。林兄的三十年河东,三十年河西说的极是,优胜劣汰,问题是,弱小的群体这个社会还是需要关注的。谢谢林兄留言,周末快乐!
暖冬cool夏 发表评论于
回复 '亮亮妈妈' 的评论 : 亮妈好!刚刚去拜读了你的读书报告,写得好,有侧重点.你2017年就读了这本书, thanks to Liangliang,我如果不是电影,还根本不知道有这样一本书的.我们的观点是一致的.谢谢亮妈的分享,周末快乐!
暖冬cool夏 发表评论于
回复 '7grizzly' 的评论 : Hi, My friend. Sorry for the typo. It is "moocher", and I did not realize until you mentioned it here. It was also a new word to me. You are right that sometimes those deep-rooted culture, habits or norms not only shaped us, but stymied the growth. And the poverty IS a result of capitalism, the rich getting richer and the poor poorer. Thanks for your visit and thoughtful comments!
Thank you for sharing the thought-provoking summaries.
The word 'moucher' was new to me. The system condones mouchers and I don't have
a cow with them. The tax-payers are willing accomplices, in a sense.
Transplanted or uprooted, there is an edge to the first-gen immigrants in their
plight. Me? I feel so lucky that I prospered in the adopted land.
It's more often that people grow old without wisdom. Not many look back and try
to understand how the past has shaped the present. As some say, "the past is not
dead; it's not even past."
Social capital is a useful handle.
The root of poverty (for the poor) might as well be the capitalism model itself.
菲儿天地 发表评论于
多谢暖冬的好分享,书评写得非常的详尽,并且和中国现在流行的电视剧结合在了一起。我听社会学家的朋友也介绍过这本书,不过还没去读过。“这个社会是有阶级之分的,贫富之间有着无法逾越的鸿沟“,同意前半句,后半句有不同的看法。这个社会并不100%地公平,每人的起跑线也可能不同,但如果作者能成功,如果最高法院大法官C Thomas 能成功,共和党总统竞选人,著名医生Ben Carson 能成功,Starbuck的创始人Howard Schultz能成功,说明贫富之间并不一定有一条“无法逾越“的鸿沟。。。