Vance and Facts of Life

By J. Michael Atherton

The Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, JD Vance, dismissed school shootings as a “Fact of Life.”

How strange.  We elect people to at least pretend that they have solutions.  Not Vance.  For Vance school shootings are nothing more than something that inevitably happens, and we had better get used to it because shootings are, after all, “facts of life.”  Can’t argue with facts.  Just accept them.

What other “facts of life” would Vance have accepted?  Let’s envision Vance’s advice for past problems.  What about lead polluting our gasoline?  Vance would do nothing about it because, for Vance, lead pollution is just a “fact of life.”  He’d advise us to accept it and move on.  

Republican legislators bellowed that seat belts, air bags, and catalytic converters would sink the auto market if required for all cars.  No sinking occurred, not even a bit, and now we are safer and breathe cleaner air.   Before law required the use of seat belts, catalytic converters, and air bags, hundreds of thousands of people died unnecessarily from accidents and polluted air.  Nevertheless, since accidents and pollution were “facts of life,” Vance would have let them slide.  

Before Title IX was passed female athletes at all levels of schooling were forced to take seconds or not even play sports.  Title IX changed all that and paved the way for the present where American women out-medaled men in the Paris Olympics.  Isolating and ignoring female athletes was at one time a “fact of life” that apparently Vance would have accepted along with death and taxes.   

Before Head Start began millions of children from poor homes arrived in First Grade needing help with the social and intellectual skills necessary to succeed.  They fell behind their peers and school became a hopeless embarrassment.  Instead of just accepting failure as a fact, Head Start prepared them for future schooling.  By all academic measures Head Start succeeded.  But Vance would have seen the academic and social gap for millions of children as, you guessed it, a “fact of life.”  In Vance-think, such things happen so we had better not get all worked up and finance ways to address this problem.  In Vance-world wealthy children should advance, and children of the poor should remain behind in keeping with his “facts of life” philosophy.  

Vance should get his facts straight.

While it is a fact that school shootings occur, by adding the phrase “of life” Vance dismisses the shootings.  It is a fact of life, for example, that we must die.  However, it is not a “fact of life” that children must die by gun violence as Vance’s inane remark suggests. Vance is wrong.  He was also wrong when he dismissed and insulted women without children as cat ladies.  He got it wrong again when he said President Biden allows fentanyl to enter the US as a plot to kill off MAGA voters (though it seems Vance is suggesting that MAGA voters use fentanyl).   He knowingly got it wrong when he claimed legal immigrants in Ohio ate pets.  He got it wrong when he complained that people labeled Trump a fascist, when Trump has frequently called Harris a fascist.  He is a virtual cornucopia of getting things wrong.  

It is an established fact that Vance repeatedly gets it wrong.  Though it is not a “fact of life” that Vance will constantly get things wrong, he seems to be working on it.