I grew up thinking my kin folk were ignorant, dumb, and clueless.

They constantly told me to “stop being a know-it-all.” But how could I?

It’s not that I, as a seven year old, knew more than every adult around me — although I was voraciously reading encyclopedias since age 3 to keep myself busy, while mom slept between working overnights at 911 dispatch for still not enough pay to make ends meet. It’s just that I couldn’t train my brain to believe I was stupid.

The human brain will do anything, everything to avoid believing its host is stupid or bad. So, to make sure I wouldn’t become a worthless, ignorant, incapable, no-good waste of air, my brain convinced itself to be just a little too smart for my own good.

But all around me since before I was born were these little reminders, every day, as pervasive as kudzu and ubiquitous as air, telling me hillbillies are dumb. Telling me I must be dumb – unless I reject my roots and my culture in the Ozark Mountains and embrace academic intelligence and colonization, and pursue my own authority to look down on those ignorant hillbillies I come from who “vote against their own interests” and need to be “enlightened” by “educated” folk.

Let’s dig deep enough to ask ourselves the big questions beyond the Red Team vs. Blue Team game. Our lives, and how our children learn to perceive themselves, is not a game.

If you treat a child’s – or a neighbor’s – self-perception like it’s a joke, there is no prize to win anyway.

I have personally observed in the 2016 election cycle and again this year: The Democrats have a serious problem with punching down at hillbillies, generational poor, people who lack educational and health care access, and rural America in general.

When I say we NEED them, I’m not just saying we need their votes. I’m saying we need them as human beings – because their lives matter. The reason so many poor white folks can’t fathom why Black lives matter is often that their own lives have never mattered, so why should anyone else’s lives get to matter if theirs don’t?

The latest couch jokes are low-hanging and rotten fruit. Taking cheap shots at JD for his awkward struggle to understand who he is, after years of being groomed into self-hating assimilation like most of us have been, will not endear the Democrats in the minds of the countless reasonable-enough people who just want their children fed and to pay the mortgage or rent on time.

Allow me to introduce Melungeon Appalachian genius Terra Vance, who discusses our hypersexualization beautifully right here (because DEI education calls for the whole choir.)

“The only representation I got of my history was the oversexed and abjectly brainless, toothless, dirty, barefoot dolts fighting over a pig and drooling over a blonde woman with teeth and a banjo in Looney Toons.”

I’ll mention briefly, as well, Elly May of the Beverly Hillbillies, who hails from the Ozark Mountains like me. She’s the subject of every man’s pursuit. The punchline of entire episodes revolves around men’s surprise that she’s actually a real human with unique abilities, knowledge, and interests.

How does a “good hillbilly girl” respond to threats of sexual enslavement by an “educated,” “liberal arts” man of “enlightened culture”?

“I declare, Sonny, you’re more fun than a bucket of tadpoles.”

That’s how easy teaching children to give up access to our bodies without a moment of hesitation is. If it’s not sex, it’s manual labor. Someone will take our bodies from us, one way or the other. I remember Governor Mike Huckabee saying when I was a teen that women should learn to enjoy being raped since it’s inevitable anyway. News article searches today suggest his statement was not as inflammatory and noteworthy around 2003-04 as it was in 1990.

This is how Arkansas girls (Huckabee’s daughter included) have long been taught to form attachment styles in childhood. We’ve been taught to make sexual objectification “as much fun as a bucket of tadpoles,” so we don’t end up unmarried by 18 and left to the wolves to die alone and hungry as childless cat ladies. This fear-based cultural reinforcement is how we end up pregnant by 16 and singing Earl had to die by 24.

(And, in the case of Gov. Sarah Sanders, legislating that deeply-engrained fear onto others’ bodies, too. See Paulo Freire quote above.)

As a child, I was taught I only have two things worth offering anyone:

1. Access to my body — hips out and eyelashes flittering like Bugs Bunny for girls,
   or back-breaking labor for boys,
   while non-binary hillbillies and rednecks (yes, these are two distinct groups) are often both sexually objectified like women and also expected to do manual labor on par with men — or,
2. Access to my intelligence. This latter offer is generally only valid for those of us yearning for a better fate hard enough to leave our kinfolk and their ways of life behind. Assimilation is half the price tag.

“Intelligence” as measured by people who perceive themselves as superior than my kin, who deride and devalue everything about where I come from, and who frame my code-switching into their “superior” ways of life as noble and good, rather than as a betrayal of my heritage.

(Had you not yet considered why the name “Heritage Foundation” so effectively and positively resonates with people you’ve never sat down to a cup of sweet tea on the porch with before?)

The choice JD made is plain as daylight. May God have mercy on him when he breaks amidst all the self-loathing and denial of who he really comes from. The road back to God from there ain’t pertty, I know.

Now, although there is plenty to criticize about ol’ JD, I’ve been overwhelmed lately by various Democrats’ low jabs and stereotypes of hillbillies in their denigration of him. The so-called “protectors of democracy” who are “fighting for the soul of our nation” and want to restore “humanity, compassion, care, and courage” to our nation are… sex-shaming a young man with hillbilly roots for, what, jerking off on a couch? Making fun of the Republican Presidential candidate’s IQ and reading grade level?

How do you expect anyone to believe your party supports bodily autonomy, freedom, and minding your own damn business when you’re punching down at JD Vance for reasons that have nothing to do with his policies and leadership decisions?

If you’ve not yet read Don’t Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff, you need to. Yesterday. It explains clearly why the “low IQ” rhetorical approach is actually scientifically more effective, and why the Democrats’ “he’s so dumb” approach is so ineffective that your policies don’t even matter anymore, if you make people feel dumb in the process of presenting them.

Literally, all the Democrats have to do to “win” the election right now is not punch down at hillbillies. That was all they had to do in 2016, too — yet, over and over, they chose to berate, thumb their noses, and look down on intergenerationally poor and disenfranchised rural Americans instead. They chose feeling smugly superior over demonstrating actual integrity, principles, and ethical values — and we know too well where that path led us to.

Enough have been consistently punching down at their neighbors to make it seem, in the minds of many, that Democrats have “gotten above their raisin'” and see themselves as cocky and superior to the people they represent. The more folks misbehave by taking petty swipes at “the other side”, the more blame for their behavior gets pushed onto the leader in the minds of their neighboring voters — their leader, who at this moment, happens to be a Black woman.

Do you believe she really needs any more reckless antagonism stirred up by her own team?

Is it really beneficial to the common good, or to her campaign, to be making fun of “toothless” Republicans?

Your behavior is a reflection of your leader’s leadership skills. Your behavior is a reflection of your parents, of your teachers, and of everyone you look up to. The Dems win no favor when people denigrate their rural neighbors, showing off how superior Dems think they are – over what, a young man jerking off on a couch? Having teeth? Using big words like “denigrate”?

The two paths before us this November are plain as day. We’ve got to do better for the next seven generations. Whatever you’ve been doing before, today is a new day, and you can make a new choice. Please lift people up instead of punching down.

Governor Walz was a public school teacher and championship-winning football coach who provided free breakfasts & lunches for all kids as governor.

Governor Sanders, in Arkansas this past year, defunded public schools, banned books, and “solved” child hunger by loosening child labor restrictions, allowing poor children even in elementary school to work so they can earn the meals their parents working two jobs already can’t afford.

I’ve been working since I was 10, and picked up odd jobs as early as 5. My mother made me get a full-time job soon as I turned 16, to buy my own food. I wasn’t allowed to eat from her fridge anymore.

“Kid’s gotta eat? Kid’s gotta work.”

Those children in that photo on the right are me. These are the children of Arkansas. Look at their faces. See us.

What is there to smile about when the best outcome for your life is being dressed up in a suit, selling yourself to authoritarians who only ever “reward” your sacrifices with the privilege of working for them without a living wage?

“Micro” aggressions against hillbillies only feel “micro” to those who carelessly say them — not to us who are surviving the reality of being discarded, abused, and denied bodily autonomy and medical care.

I didn’t start writing a whole, ongoing story about teens growing up in the Ozarks, in which a 12 year old is pregnant, for some shock value. That character exists because I went to school with five of her. Because I took my first pregnancy test when I was 12. Because 1 in 4 female classmates were pregnant by the end of high school, including my step-sister at 16.

It’s not just a “couch” joke. It’s actually another reminder that you care so much more about turning our always-criticized sexual coping strategies into a punchline for your entertainment than you care about how our hungry children are being exploited, taught to hate themselves, and trained to bend their sexual and non-sexual self-expressions to meet the demands of your gaze, at the expense of being meaningfully effective in policy re-direction.

Couch jokes are just another jab at the countless people who don’t want to vote for the Republican candidate but simply cannot fathom how any good at all can come from voting for those elitist, no-good, holier-than-thou, know-it-all Democrats always looking down their noses at us hillbillies and thinking they’re better than everyone else, when y’all ain’t even from ’round here.

Dear reader, I beg of you: Step into the brightest light of living out your values today, for all to see.

Write down your values. Look at them on paper. Ask yourself before you speak: Is what I’m saying really in alignment with what I tell my children I believe in for their future?

Shaming hillbillies ain’t values-based. Or if it is, then your values don’t deserve to control the country anyway.

But I do believe there are better values in you than that.

Show me what you’re really made of, when you’re at your most honest, compassionate, and courageous. I desperately want to see you shine. I want to see Arkansas children shine, as they learn from you how it’s done.

The world needs that warmth from you. We need that warmth from each other. That’s the way we all heal. Together.