The Good Ole Days, more dream than real.

 (Cross posted from my Facebook account) 

Do you long for the Good Old Days ? 

        Feeling Nostalgic for the "good old days" of the 50s and early 60s? Yeah, that's probably because our higher taxes and stronger union protections made it possible for you to get a good paying job right out of high school and be able to support a family on it. But then you tossed all that in the garbage by voting for a string of men who cut taxes on the richest Americans and then told you it was your fault you weren't making enough money. Of course, you got tired of hearing it was your fault for not making enough money, so then they started telling you it was "The Illegals" who were taking your jobs. And the Foreigners. They tried to train you to hate those people, and many of you did. When all the while, it was you who voted for Reagan, GHW Bush, W Bush and now Trump, who sold you down the river. You bought into the conservative mumbo-jumbo , the hate-mongering and fear-mongering, and now you're seeing your progeny get hammered by the tool you thought would make YOUR life better. Well, has it ? Your children, the so-called Millenials, have an average of 37000 in student loan debt -- debt they accrued because successive waves of conservatives have all but wiped out grants, and seen to it that college tuition has skyrocketed. Your children, those self-same Millenials everyone loves to complain about, are stuck in jobs with few benefits and all too often are "full time availability with part time hours" or trick hours where they work 39 hours a week so their employer doesn't have to pay their insurance or retirement benefits. Oh sure, they might get a 401k . . . for company stock, which could collapse at any moment. Further, said millenials have had their retirement age pushed from 62 to 65 to 67 and it'll be 69 or 70 soon. Oh, but their social security will be means-tested so that the conservatives can call it "Welfare" and then cut it. But don't worry, YOUR Medicaid won't be cut. and YOUR SSRI won't be cut. But what about the rest of us ?

It was not Ronald Reagan, GHW Bush or GW Bush, it wasn't the 230-odd republican/Tea-Party/Libertarian-Conservatives in the House of Representatives or the 52 in the Senate who killed The American Dream, it was you who voted for all those men. You bought into their line of bullshit, and now you have to own it. The good news is, you do not have to let things lie. You don't have to stay in the bed you made, you can get up and re-make it. But you won't get there by voting for more of the same. You won't get there by putting more conservatives in office. You will only continue to revoke the generations of social progress that led up to your being able to have the jobs you had, and that your children and grandchildren need.