American culture, through the eyes of Social Security and J.D. Vance | In Focus

Published 1:00 pm Wednesday, April 15, 2026

All of you have war stories to tell about living in American culture with its class divisions, the Social Security System, and the healthcare companies.

I’m going to share a few of my own war stories to help you understand what’s going on around you that you may or may not understand. We’re going to examine three examples that should help you navigate American culture.

The first lessons come from Vice-President J.D. Vance from his excellent book, Hillbilly Elegy. Vance grew up as a part of what he calls hillbilly culture. He came from white working-class Appalachian Kentucky and southern Ohio.

Vance’s childhood was chaotic. Adults around him were constantly yelling, screaming, throwing things, and swearing. Stability and calm were rare commodities. Violence was part of his and his older sister’s lives. The only real stability he and his sister got came from his mother’s parents: Mamaw’, and Papaw’. His mother had at least five husbands. Numerous other men lived with them over their childhoods. Their mother was a drug addict, and on occasion, mentally ill.

The part of the book that is most revealing about American culture is where he talked about being able to attend Yale Law School. He was smart, but some of his success came from caring adults who nurtured him at the right time with information and self-awareness that he lacked.

The part that most clearly shows the divide between being a hillbilly and the elite upper class came with the people he met while in law school. They had a different way of seeing the world. In Vance’s life experiences, it was what you know. When he began to mingle with his Yale classmates, he came to understand that what one knew was less important than who you knew.

Before Yale, when he applied for jobs, he sent out dozens of resumes. When he was at Yale, law firms came to him, interviewing him, and offering him six-figure jobs. What he didn’t know about elite culture he learned from his Yale friends and their families. They had connections that do not exist in Appalachia. These friends and associates taught him how to dress, what to say and not say, and how to eat with multiple pieces of silverware at fancy dinners. They also taught him to control his temper.

My second example comes my experience with the Social Security Administration. As long as I taught enough credits at community college, I could get cheap medical insurance. When I didn’t have enough credits, I had to go on Medicare and deal with Social Security. Three times I would travel from Enumclaw to the Kent Commons Social Security office, getting there early and waiting an hour to be the first in line. Two times I was lied to by the Social Security employees about how to get benefits. They just wanted to get rid of me.

I figured out what to say by the third time. When the employee told me that she couldn’t help me, I said, “I want to talk to your supervisor.” A light dawned in her head. She spent the next twenty-five minutes solving my problem. I walked out, my problem solved.

My third experience comes from dealing with Medicare Advantage insurance companies. If I had to get a special medical procedure, it had to be approved by insurance before they would pay. On several occasions the applications were rejected. Rather than giving up, which is what 94% of applicants do according to a recent article in the Tacoma News Tribune, I reapplied. Insurance companies paid every time for the medical procedures by my being persistent.

Why does this happen? Insurance companies are number crunchers. Their accountants look at statistics and know they can save money by rejecting the first requests as standard procedure, knowing that a very high percentage will give up. That saves them money and shifts the debt to the patients to either pay-out-of-pocket, or simply continue to suffer—or die.

Time and space limit my examples, but each of you who are adults have your own war stories to tell about dealing with elites or large corporations. The elites prosper because they have created many relationships with people who know people or can afford to hire people who know how to work the systems in American culture. That’s why the wealthy pay a lower percentage of taxes than the poor. They hire accountants and lobbyists who write laws to benefit the wealthy.

Your solution is to develop multiple relationships with many different people who know more than you do. Ignorance is not bliss, and never has been.