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One of the most enduring and damaging myths is that wealth denotes competence. The wealthy are often beneficiaries of systematic privilege, familial resources, and pure luck. Believing them capable, and punishing the poor for perceived faults, has hurt this country immeasurably.
To look at the current American landscape is to see a country on the verge of breaking. We have an abject failure of a “businessman” as president, a few supercapitalists who contribute little to society other than endangering it, and everyone else who does without.
Hardly a day passes where there isn’t another story about crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, dismal progress, and people suffering declining lives and accompanying illness and despair deaths. These individual stories need put into a shared context: SOMETHING ISN’T RIGHT.
For a book I’ve been researching the Gilded Age, and my god does it line up to where we’re at. Its emphasis on personal worth based on wealth, as well as the government being bought and sold by wealthy interests is just uncanny. The question is whether we’ll wake up.
The truth is that this system of inequality only lasts so long as the general populace doesn’t question it, as long as the dots go unconnected. The Gilded Age gave way to a restructuring when the people organized and demanded change. It’s possible now...it’s necessary now.
A system only survives if the people ensnared in it either believe it to be unchangeable or lose the will to change it. Despair is understandable, but it fuels this thing. We’re reaching a tipping point. Donald Trump could represent that tipping point, but there’s work to do.
