I feel the need to explain something to the generation that does not remember, or never saw, a world where one person with a high school education could support a family of 5 comfortably.

This was real. For millions of US families. It was *normal.*

It was stolen from you. https://twitter.com/open_sketchbook/status/1320628203585740800

Please do not buy the idea that a world of constant economic uncertainty, where no matter how much you work you can lose everything from one emergency, is normal or acceptable.

It is not.

It has been imposed on you by 40+ years of federal and state policies intended to rob you.

Our current income disparity, our dissolving middle class...all of it is manufactured.

We did not always live like this and we do not always have to live like this.

To be clear: "Middle class" even means something different now than it did when I was a kid.

When I was growing up, a "middle class" family could pay for all the necessaries of life - housing, utilities, food, transportation, healthcare, a kid's college - themselves. At once.

They might not have much more than that, but they had the total security of KNOWING that they could pay for all those things, no problem, and that their savings would get them through a broken-down car or work leave for cancer treatment.

For millions of families, THIS WAS NORMAL AND EXPECTED.

It was what you could expect if just ONE adult in the household had finished high school.

All your bills, covered. Emergencies, covered. By your one 40 hour a week job. A 2nd job was for play money and was optional.

"Work harder if you want to get ahead" meant "instead of just punching in to your normal full-time job, do that and also go be a cashier on the weekends."

It was more work, sure. But it was *sustainable.*

None of this "do both those jobs and Uber and Etsy just to pay rent."

This world was real.

I grew up in this world.

I'm not even 40 yet.

We can get it back.

It means we have to reverse 40+ years if economic policy intended to funnel ever more money into the hordes of billionaires.

But we can do it. Those rules were made and they can be unmade.

We can make this economy work for more people than it currently does work for.

It used to work for the Homer Simpsons of the world. Now we are all Frank Grimes.

We don't have to be.

I saw someone point this out in a QT, and it bears adding here: The reason so many of us who grew up in this world are furious right now is that this is what we were promised.

Stay in school, do your best, and you'll get security.

Instead we got nothing.

Or less than nothing, even. My entire career has been climbing out of one recession after another.

I had just climbed out of the dot-com bubble burst when the housing bubble went. I had just climbed out of that recession when COVID hit.

Millions of adults - in the middle of our careers, at what should be our highest-earning, most-retirement-funding point - are in the same boat.

(PS "Middle class" used to mean your retirement was guaranteed, too.)

Fun Fact: My parents, who each had a high school education only, bought a house apiece in 1990.

A house *apiece.* As in, my mom bought a house (and barn and tenant house and 40 acres) and my dad bought a house (and 3 acres in the suburbs).

These were not large or fancy houses. In fact, the total combined square footage of both houses was around 1750.

My mom was 34 and my dad was 36.

I grew up in that world, and it seems unreal now. That's why I worry that those who never experienced it will never believe it.

Both of those houses were paid off in total by the time I graduated high school in 2000.

Something else I see coming up in comments that is worth mentioning:

This "normal" was not normal for millions, as well. This "normal" relied on what MLK called the "airtight cage of poverty" trapping Black people and many others.

I want to believe we can build a world where this type of security is available to everyone, without having to build it on exploitation and bigotry.

We did not build that world in the previous century. If we plan to rebuild it in this one, we cannot do it with oppression.