>I'm also fairly certain that Vance did not wander the streets of Middletown, feral and unparented. My understanding is that he was raised by his grand-parents, not that he lived with the chaos of his mother's situation.

So an addict mother, having to be raised by grand-parents, having to go to the army and then use the GI Bill to study, growing up in an declining small working class town in Ohio, are not enough?

He had to be "feral and unparented" to qualify? Because that's what people mean when they talk about the working and middle class "white American struggles"? Vicorian street urchins?

In any case, by those elements alone, he knows 100x about "white American struggles" than the average champion of the poor at the Met Gala and the New Yorker.

There is legitimate trauma in his past. But "grew up in poverty" is a distinct thing.

>In any case, by those elements alone, he knows 100x about "white American struggles" than the average champion of the poor at the Met Gala and the New Yorker.

Doesn't that kinda make his current actions worse? The "met gala" people can claim ignorance, he understands struggling and still screws over the struggling.

Okay. Dude. You triggered me. The Marine Corps is not the Army. Nothing else you say has any merit with me because you can't get that basic fact right.

Are you an AI? Probably not. I think most LLMs would understand the difference between the Army and Marines.