I’m terrified i’ll end up with nothing

journey 03

i struggle with this one the most.

the richest 1% of americans own more than 30% of the country's wealth. the bottom 50% share about 2.5%. during the pandemic, while millions of people lost jobs and couldn't pay rent, american billionaires grew their wealth by around 70%. roughly 40 to 45% of american children live in households classified as poor or low income.

in the wealthiest country that has ever existed.

so when you lie awake thinking about college debt, or rent, or what happens if you pick the wrong path, that's just looking at the numbers.

but here's what i keep coming back to.

this isn't how it had to turn out. the gap between people who have everything and people who have nothing isn't natural. it isn't because some people worked harder. it's because specific people made specific decisions at specific momentsand a lot of those decisions were made for them, not for you.

1934.

Huey Long is a senator from Louisiana and he is angry in the way that makes people uncomfortable. not privately. on national radio. repeatedly.

he looks at the depression, soup lines, foreclosures, families with nothing, and then looks at the wealth sitting untouched at the top and says it plainly: twelve men own more wealth than 120 million people. that's a system working exactly as designed.

he proposes Share Our Wealth. cap personal fortunes. redistribute what's left over. guarantee every family a home, an education, a real life. 25 million people listen to his radio addresses. by 1935, 7.5 million people have joined his movement across 27,000 clubs nationwide. farmers. workers. ordinary families. meeting in courthouses and living rooms because someone finally said what they already knew.

(Long was not a good man. he was authoritarian, manipulative, and used his power in ways that should make anyone uncomfortable. this is not an endorsement of him — it's just proof that the right question can come from the wrong person. and the question he was asking was right.)

Roosevelt reportedly calls him one of the two most dangerous men in America.

some historians believe the pressure from his movement pushed Roosevelt further left — toward Social Security, toward the labor protections that still exist today. the man didn't finish what he started. but what he started didn't disappear.