Hope Is Not a Villain—But This Kind of Hope Is

We need a movement ready to restore America on a path to become the country we've dreamt of being for centuries. Not the fantasy of individual escape, but the reality of collective power.

An excerpt from my latest piece at Common Dreams
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/hope-is-not-the-villain

I dropped out of high school. Got my GED. Worked as a general contractor in East Tennessee. Built things with my hands. Fixed busted systems. Lived paycheck to paycheck. That was my life, and for most of it, hope meant something real. Hope that a decent day's work would pay the bills. That a roof over your head and a future for your kids wasn't too much to ask.

But somewhere along the way, hope got hijacked.

Now hope looks like scratching off lottery tickets. Buying crypto hoping to get rich quick. Praying your side hustle turns into the next big thing. We don't hope to fix the system anymore.

We hope to escape it. And that kind of hope will kill us.

You see it everywhere. People identify with billionaires instead of their neighbors. They defend the rich because maybe someday they'll be rich too. They talk about taxes like they're one lucky break away from needing a tax shelter. The Hunger Games tried to warn us, and instead we started dressing like the Capitol.

I don't want to kill hope. I want to reclaim it.

Look at the numbers. The average person has a better chance of getting struck by lightning than becoming a billionaire. The odds of winning the lottery? About 1 in 292 million. Meanwhile, the odds of having medical debt? Nearly 1 in 3 Americans. The odds of being laid off or priced out or wiped out by rent? Closer to 1 in 2.

So why do we still believe? Because facing the truth is harder. The truth that the game is rigged. That the rungs of the ladder we were promised have been sawed off; the American Dream got replaced by American Denial….

Read the rest of my piece on Common Dreams
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/hope-is-not-the-villain