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Growing Up "Hippie Poor" vs. "Hillbilly Poor"

 

Recently I finished J.D. Vance's excellent Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, a book that's part sociological analysis about poor white Americans, and part memoir about growing up with a drug-addicted mother and all the crappy crap that goes with that. I come from the opposite corner of the socioeconomic spectrum (well, the "socio" part of the poor spectrum). Vance was Hillbilly Poor and I was Hippie Poor, but my experience was about 90% the same as his.

When media types talk about "poor whites," they don't usually mean the kind that we were -- the kind with college educated parents and brown-bread sandwiches and an Ecology flag on the front door. But we were chronically poor -- like not-enough-food-poor -- starting when my mother first walked out on my dad, bought a VW bus and turned our Berkeley home into a commune. I was seven at the time.

People who weren't in Berkeley in the late 60s and early 70s often have sugar-coated idea of what was happening then. When I tell new friends the commune story, their first reaction is to find it charming, projecting (I think) women gathering eggs from the yard together, or children learning woodworking by the fire.

But it was more like this: Six people moved in with my mom and her three kids, and there was a lot of partying -- weed, LSD, booze (mostly booze) and a gradually accelerating destruction of order, modesty and safety....

                      READ THE REST OF THIS POST AT CRAPPYCHILDHOODFAIRY.COM

Anna Runkle is a mother and video producer in Berkeley, CA, and writes the blog Crappy Childhood Fairy, and has a book coming out this spring about Childhood PTSD and how to heal from it.

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Thank you! I love this, this is so me too. I often qualify my statement, I grew up poor with well you know 'hippy poor'.  My husband grew up hillbilly poor, he jokingly scoffs at my version of poor which was filled with art galleries (on the free day) and avant garde cinema but also food stamps, hedonism, and 10 roommates lol. 

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