The fact that many feel this way is an interesting perspective in and of itself. But perhaps more interesting is the fact that this is directly at odds with most objective metrics.
1. https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2018/03/01/po...
1. Life expectancy - getting lower for the first time in generations
2. Suicide rate - at an all-time high
3. Opioid crisis - need I say more
4. Labor participation 63% - the lowest since 1978
5. Stagnant (falling for some) real wages since the Internet bubble crisis (2001)
I could go on for much longer....
https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti...
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-...
2,3. The improving economy should help. We are at historically low levels of unemployment for many subgroups, including hispanics and blacks. Factory employment has recovered to levels not seen in decades.
4. Labor participation should continue to drop as the baby boomers retire. It will rise again as they die. The normal unemployment numbers, which don't include the retired, are showing a situation that is wonderful for American workers. The numbers would look even better if not for the fact that large numbers of "discouraged workers" are reentering the workforce; these people had not been counted because they had given up looking for work.
5. Wages are starting to rise. Of course, businesses are demanding immigration to "fix" the "problem" of rising wages.
It's really not. Even the expected lifespan of Americans is declining. The only objective metrics that look good are GDP - and growth in this area is increasingly distributed upwards while the middle class doesn't really see a benefit. A reduction in poverty is good (assuming it's real and not a statistical sleight of hand), but the kids this article is talking about are the middle class - which is in decline[1].
[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking...
The link I provided gave several objective metrics that indicate positive trends. More people have access to goods and services that used to be more exclusive. People without access to basic infrastructure (e.g. plumbing, electricity)s are drastically fewer.
Upper, middle, and lower class are artificial labels. They don't correspond to quality of life. A decline or increase in one does not indicate a change in hardship. The question I seek to answer is, "has life gotten better or worse for the average person?" or "how has life changed for the Americans in the X to Y income percentile?". Overall the trends are positive.
Even life expectancy has a overall upwards trend. It has gone from about 70 to close to 80 over the past 40 years, which was the time frame that the previous commenter referred to.
>These measures better reflect changes in household welfare. Bruce Sacerdote, an economist at Dartmouth College notes the poorest quarter of households in America had 0.75 vehicles per household in 1970 compared to 1.4 per household in 2015. In 1960, more than one third of households in the bottom quarter of the income distribution lacked indoor plumbing; by 2015 virtually all households had indoor water and sewer systems. Microwave ovens have spread from luxury to ubiquity alongside mobile phones—microwaves are now owned by 97% of households.
Sure, it's great that we aren't dealing with Cholera outbreaks anymore, but that's not what people are talking about here and it might come across as a bit insulting and disingenuous to point to the fact that indoor plumbing is now available to people living in poverty as a counterpoint to skyrocketing wealth inequality.
That is the time frame specified by the original commenter.
> Sure, it's great that we aren't dealing with Cholera outbreaks anymore, but that's not what people are talking about here
Then what are people taking about here? People in this thread (and society at large) are saying life is getting harder over the past several decades, but conspicuously absent are measurements that demonstrate that this is the case.
People can afford better things, are provided with better services. Post taxes, less people are in poverty. Post taxes, and adjusted for purchasing power, less than a fifth as many people are in poverty. This directly contradicts the original poster's claim that it is easier than ever to slip into poverty. The shore, to reuse his metaphor, is not shrinking. And yet, many seem to harbor the idea that it is. That's the mysterious aspect.
But maybe I'm taking things out of context, sorry.
It is instructive to read Marx to answer this question. How much time do working people need to work every day to earn enough to reproduce themselves? College education is now expected for many jobs (working people reproducing themselves means the next generation having access to similar jobs). How big of a fraction of median income does a median college degree cost? What about healthcare, rent/home prices? Food and clothing prices have declined a lot, but the other prices have risen to a much greater proportion of median income. How many people are now working two or more "part-time" jobs for a total of more than 40 hours a week?
> How much time do working people need to work every day to earn enough to reproduce themselves?
The Economist article linked above says that adjusted for inflation and taxes, less than one fifth as many people struggle to do so as compared to 40 years ago. Sure, it's valid to say that the percentage of people that experience that struggle (~3-4%) is still a figure that is unacceptably high. But it has been a drastic reduction from what it was four decades earlier (over 15%).
> College education is now expected for many jobs (working people reproducing themselves means the next generation having access to similar jobs).
A strange observation to make, seeing as the non-college educated reproduce at a greater rate than those who do.[1]
> What about healthcare, rent/home prices?
I mention that those are exceptions to the overall trend, but also explain that those are due to well known reasons: a large ageing generation, and an unwillingness to build housing in many growing metro areas. They are not cause by inequality, though good arguments can be made that they exacerbate it.
> Food and clothing prices have declined a lot, but the other prices have risen to a much greater proportion of median income.
Sure, some things like housing have gotten more expensive. But plenty of others have gotten cheaper. In aggregate, costs are going down. That's what the Economist article I linked above explains.
> How many people are now working two or more "part-time" jobs for a total of more than 40 hours a week?
People are spending less time on work on average.[2]
1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/97facts/edu2birt.htm
2. https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/520f835b6bb3f7730d000...
You've misinterpreted his use of the word "reproduce". It's not about birth rates.
It could be argued that people are working less because of increases in automation and more schooling and a switch from shift jobs to non-shift jobs. Reportedly someone on salary would say they work 40 hours or would be assumed - we know the reality is different than that.
Maybe in some places, but this definitely isn't true overall. In fact, I'd say in a lot of places, especially rural ones, it's a lot worse now. People are still having children, but there's not the jobs in those areas. Or, if they are, they're generally constantly temp jobs that don't offer much, or any, security. There's not the options for the kids that the parents had 20 years ago.
My mom just retired teaching after thirty years, having had several students of former students. She openly admits that she was worried for them because there's not the opportunities around that there once were.
Sure, you might counter, they can move...but that's not really feasible for everyone. It takes money to move, and it takes a good reason for someone to up and leave their family and support system as well as likely all the friends they've ever known, including many they've known since age 5, if not before. Moving isn't easy emotionally or materially, especially in areas where families are still somewhat close and community is still decently close. Sadly, too many people forget this point (though I'd say it likely holds true even in urban areas, to be honest)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product#History
But the eye opener is this, and something that is often left out. This is the change in the size of each economic group between 1979 and 2014 as a percent of the total population:
- Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8%
- Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4%
- Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32%
- Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1%
- Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8%
Statistics like this are certainly subject to biased interpretation and 'massaging'. If one is curious about the source, wiki has a section on the political stance of the Urban Institute [2]. Though the paper itself is very transparent in their methodology and extremely readable. I found it all eye opening to the point that it actually changed my worldview.
Now the most interesting thing here is that the paper I'm referencing and this Pew article are using the same methodology, and thus Pew is also basing their report off the same data. It's just interesting to see the contrast between how things are presented, and how people would respond to the raw data itself. Just to point out one more little oddity. Pew seems to focus specifically on 1999 to 2014, yet their own chart [3] indicates everybody saw declines in income from 1999 to 2014. Nonetheless their discussion seems to imply this is a uniquely middle class phenomena. E.g. the heading of the first section being: "The American middle class loses ground nationally". Yet it would be much more accurate to state that "Americans of all classes lose ground nationally."
[1] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Institute#Political_stan...
[3] - http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking...
How people make friends. How many friends people have. How much people feel they're a part of their community. How much people touch each other in general. How much people feel about their neighbors. How people dispense care to those closest to them. How large families are (extended/adopted family, etc) How close people feel to their families.
etc.
All, I think, are rapidly changing.
You can see it in another comment in this thread. One person says, basically, my childhood was horrible. The discussion is entirely about what this person, in their self-contained world, can do to alleviate their stresses and pains. Eat more veggies! I'm not knocking those sorts of comments at all--you can't exactly turn back time and change the structure of society to give that commenter a community who cares about him.
I'm not sure about all this. It just comes from my observation. I think, though, that the feeling of life is changing and has changed in a big way. And it flys completely under the radar, because it's so hard to discuss, reason through, and quantify.
With so many things tied to employment (health insurance especially), no wonder that people are worried about their futures.
I think things like "access to electricity" cause much less anxiety than the threat of instability. A lot of people are just a few missed paychecks away from literally losing their home (whether that is a house or an apartment).
Employment stability like that did not exist in the 19th century (in the US because of lack of industrialization - most people were engaged in agriculture; in industrial Britain factory workers would literally starve to death because of regular layoffs). It did not seem to exist in the US in 1900-1920 (at least that's the impression I got from reading _The Jungle_) or in the 1930s (Great Depression), and kind of disappeared with Reaganomics and the start of offshoring in the 1980s. So job stability seems like a brief state of things that lasted from the end of WWII to the end of the 1970s.
Cost of living is rising, and so are health care costs. Inflation ensures that a dollar is worth less every year.
While inflation inevitably marches on, wages have neither kept up with productivity for over 40 years[2], nor cost of living, nor inflation.
People are working multiple jobs, but their employers purposely schedule them such that they don't accrue enough hours to be considered full-time employees who are legally entitled to buy health insurance through their employer.
As an aside, while engineer pay is relatively high, it has not kept up with rising cost of living expenses over the last decade, either.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/shutdown-highlights-that-4-i...
[2] https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/1280x868/https%3A%2F%2Fbl...
The Economist article to which I linked gave multiple metrics that contradict this claim.
> And finding an affordable place to live is impossible in some areas, extremely hard almost everywhere that's desirable to live.
True, and I mentioned that there are exceptions to the overall positive tend and specifically noted housing costs. But the solution to this problem is well known: increased the supply of housing.
> And of course, poverty is relative so seeing the rich get healthcare while you and your own family get sick and die has a huge effect on people that probably isn't captured by any metric I know of.
But that's the thing: the data indicates that the poor aren't becoming worse off. Yet we have the perceptions that it is.
I think understanding why this contradictory perceptions exists lies at the heart of a lot of social chsllenges today. Like why people in the US become so strongly against immigration and free trade despite the strong evidence that these things have a positive effect on the country.
I'd posit that life hasn't been getting more difficult, but that it feels like it has become more difficult, largely because it's harder to advance your current socioeconomic status than it used to be (ie, "the hill is getting steeper"). This is also what makes the analogy particularly strong.
When you're used to accelerating growth, no growth or even constant growth feels like a downgrade.
If "socioeconomic status" is defined as income or asset percentile, then that is inherently a zero sum goal. For someone to go from the middle third of Americans by income into the top third means that someone in the top third has to go into the middle third (or bottom third).
For consumer goods, absolutely.
For other things, it's gotten much worse. Healthcare and education obviously being one of the biggest concerns.
When I graduated high school in 1997, the local community college's tuition was $17 a credit hour ($26 in today's dollars).
That small community college in the middle of nowhere is now $128 a credit hour for in-district students.
That's almost a 5x increase. For the same local community college amongst corn fields two hours from anything.
There's so many examples of this (rent, for instance) that I almost wonder what the point of pointing out the low cost of consumer goods would be.
The price of a life well lived has little to do with the price of smartphones.
I'm pointing out that is a naive analysis.
What sources do you need to back up the "claim" that home ownership and health care are qualitatively more important in many ways than consumer goods? You can get all the "stuff" you want, but if you can't get a home or pay for health emergencies it will be hard not to live in some level of fear, always scrambling for slightly more security and feeling precarious. The area of my town that I live in for example, is full of homeless people, many of whom have computers or cell phones (many more don't). It is disturbingly frequent that I see one of them start to have escalating health issue, and eventually just "disappears". Disconcerting. I have no way to know if it was always this way, or if it getting worse...but certainly disconcerting.
TL;DR - Some of the people who seem to be pushing back on your "scientific rigor" may be just wanting to not forget about the actual hardships people are going through. They probably still understand that it's good to have sources for things etc.
You can live comfortable and securely without owning a home. I do, and have been for the last half decade. Plenty of people in European countries with high standards of living rent for their whole lives. It's common among more densely populated countries, and as the US population is becoming more urban this is shift towards less home ownership is one that is likely going to happen in the US.
By comparison, you can't survive without food, water, heating (in many parts of the US), and other basic necessities. Plus, there are plenty of consumer goods that people would prioritize over home ownership:
If I told someone they could own a home but you had go without:
* A car
* Internet access
* Electricity
* Running Water
* A computer
* A cell phone
For many, even just not owning a car would make it impossible to live effectively. I'm willing to bet that most people would not take that offer even if they were deprived of just two things on that list. So it follows that these things have higher priority than home ownership in our hierarchy of needs.
> The area of my town that I live in for example, is full of homeless people, many of whom have computers or cell phones (many more don't). It is disturbingly frequent that I see one of them start to have escalating health issue, and eventually just "disappears". Disconcerting. I have no way to know if it was always this way, or if it getting worse...but certainly disconcerting.
The data does indicate that it is, on average, less bad than it was before. Even if it is not the case in your individual town, one counterexample is not sufficient to disprove a country-wide trend.
> Some of the people who seem to be pushing back on your "scientific rigor" may be just wanting to not forget about the actual hardships people are going through.
I don't deny that people are going through hardship. Whether or not someone thinks their life is difficult is their own opinion, and I respect others' opinions. But to claim that life is on average harder than it was before is no longer a statement of opinion, but a statement of fact. And it is not a statement backed up by the evidence that we have.
This is not just needless nit-picking. If the erroneous belief that the country is on a downward course takes hold, then people often become more willing to make drastic, irresponsible shifts in direction. I consider the Trump Presidency one such product of this erroneous belief in American decline. Think about this slogan, "Make America Great Again". In order for such a statement to be appealing, it effectively requires that the listener assume that America is worse in the present than it was in the past.
Here's a simple source for reference, but there are plenty more if you stick to those metrics:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/21/life-is-much-more-expensive-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/24/things-are-more-expensive-th...
Now what we're arguing here isn't facts. Both of us are making true statements: You're saying the aggregate cost-of-living is not that much higher. I'm saying the necessities of health care, housing and education are hugely off track.
What we're disagreeing about is the philosophical interpretation of those facts. I'm saying it hardly matters if mobile phones are cheaper every year, if health care is more expensive. An aggregate doesn't take into account the relative weights of importance.
Not to mention the fact that wages and income are stagnant. That's a whole other issue that multiplies the concern.
Cheaper internet access can't possibly offset the fact that rent has added 130% above inflation (US average $610 in 1960, $1405 today, both in today's dollars).
You have to establish a hierarchy of needs if you want your analysis to have any utility whatsoever.
It helps people that use cars, for one, which is a massive portion of Americans. And it's not just cars that are cheaper. Transportation is far cheaper. A coast to coast plane ticket is more than 20 times cheaper than it was in the 1980s. Again, you keep referencing specific costs, like healthcare, that have risen but then make the unsubstantiated conclusion that that overall costs have risen. People are spending more on some things like healthcare, but the studies conducted found that proportional to income meeting needs is cheaper.
> Cheaper internet access can't possibly offset the fact that rent has added 130% above inflation (US average $610 in 1960, $1405 today, both in today's dollars).
Again, it's not just cheap internet. On average, goods and services are getting cheaper across the board. You keep giving specific exceptions to the overall trend, as though it disproves it. That's as ineffective as claiming that global warming is false, because a few regions experienced cooling. One, two, or even three specific exceptions to an overall trend does not disprove that trend.
> You have to establish a hierarchy of needs if you want your analysis to have any utility whatsoever
That is exactly what the article I linked to did: they identified a set of necessities and calculated to cost of those necessities relative to post tax income over time.
By contrast, so far you have repeatedly cited increased costs of exactly three types goods and services.
The former is a much more comprehensive analysis than the latter.
Wages are flat while Cost of Living and/or inflation is skyrocketing (Real world inflation, not the CPI index).
This, generally, is the strongest evidence that the bottom end of the wealth distribution is getting worse.
> By most metrics (ignoring housing and healthcare)
Wait, you can't just ignore housing and healthcare, that's like the biggest chunk of every American's budget.
The four things America has regressed on the most (in quality and/or cost), is housing, healthcare, education/child-care, and transportation. Those four things combined are roughly 75-99% of a typical American families spending.
Yeah, you can still buy a cheap hamburgers and cheap gas and cheap flat screen TVs. That's useful. But that's not useful enough to counteract all the losses elsewhere.
> both of which are primarily causes by an undersupply of housing and a growing cohort of old people, rather then inequality
That's a popular misconception. Housing problems are primarily caused by private equity and deregulation -- undersupply is a tiny portion of the problem in a few key metros (especially SF), but is not the widespread cause of it. In Michigan, for example, we have a rampant urban housing crisis too -- and zero percent of that is caused by any undersupply of housing.
Similarly, Healthcare costs rising is largely because of private equity and price fixing / fraud between health insurers and hospitals. "People growing old" is only a tiny portion of that problem, as evidenced by the many other nations who also have large aging populations putting strains on their healthcare systems, but not having the same astronomically high healthcare costs.
> Objective metrics like infant mortality, access to infrastructure like electricity and plumbing, educational attainment, all indicate positive trends
Suicide is rising sharply. Opiate abuse is rising, and so are the deaths from it. Access to infrastructure is falling (see Flint Water Crisis, or deferred infrastructure maintenance in NYC, or the routine underinvestment in roads and schools). The US personal savings rate is declining rapidly -- people who have "good incomes" (by your metrics) don't have any money left over to save, and so are on-paper good but actually financially insecure.
----
I think seeing the problem is a "perception-only" issue is Ivory Tower thinking. People don't just "feel" that things have gotten worse, things have objectively gotten worse, and pretending otherwise will only make the situation harder to fix.
Wait, what? What is the crisis and what is the cause?
I wouldn't be surprised if the average American's material conditions have been steady or even creeping upwards over the last 50 years, but I also wouldn't be surprised to learn that the personal cost of maintaining these conditions has been growing significantly.
Down about 100 hours per year from 1970. I like the idea of quantifying stress but that is probably too subjective to quantitatively measure. I don't necessarily dispute the notion that stress has increased over the past few decades - just that whatever pressure people are feeling is due to declining quality of life or economic opportunity.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w13837
The Increase in Leisure Inequality
This paper examines the changing allocation of time within the United States that has occurred between 1965 and 2003-2005. We find that the time individuals have allocated to leisure has increased in the U.S. for both men and women during this period, with almost the entire gain occurring prior to 1985. We also find that post 1985 there has been a substantial increase in leisure inequality, particularly for men. Over the last 20 years, less educated men increased the time they allocated to leisure while more educated men recorded a decrease in leisure time. While the relative decline in the employment rate of less educated men is important, trends in employment status explain less than half of the increase in the leisure gap.
If 90% of the people are at the same socioeconomic level as you, even if living in poverty, you don’t feel particularly left out.
If that balance shifts to the 20% we have now, then suddenly it starts to be a bit disturbing.
Of course it's a massive issue, but it always amuses me when people look back to how "great" it used to be. For a white male, the 50's seemed pretty great. If I was anything else I'm pretty sure I would choose 2019.
The progress we've made in civil rights — there are women alive today who were born before women could vote! — is great and the current administration shows that we still have a long way to go.
But note that while we have made progress on civil rights in many ways, the increasing economic disparity hurts underrepresented groups too. "It's worse for white people but better for black people" is an over-simplification. Black people are suffering under these economic problems too.
> increasing economic disparity hurts underrepresented groups too
Close, but increasing economic disparity hurts underrepresented groups _most_. And, as it's been said, what we have made is only generously defined as progress--and most vehemently by those who seek to halt what little progress we've made as "sufficient".
> If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress.
This Malcolm X quote does a great job highlighting how the cessation of a particular oppression is hardly progress. Since slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and Red-Lining, there has been little in the way of reparations to make African American communities whole--not to mention the millions of Mesoamericans(1) similarly exploited in the history of American Imperialism(2), and still to this day(3)!
So, thanks again for that completely brilliantly painted analogy. I hope you find these texts offer some compelling augmentations to your understanding.
1) Eduardo Galeano's "The Open Veins of Latin America"
2) Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz' "An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States"
3) CrimethInc's "No Wall They Can Build"
> Close, but increasing economic disparity hurts underrepresented groups _most_.
Yes, so, you should celebrating that you and are in agreement that increasing economic disparity is bad.
> And, as it's been said, what we have made is only generously defined as progress
It is progress in any and all possible definitions. Going from "black people are legally considered property" to "a black person is the President of the United States of America" in less than 200 years sounds like a hell of a lot of progress to me.
> and most vehemently by those who seek to halt what little progress we've made as "sufficient".
Nowhere does anyone claim it is "sufficient". You are painting anyone who's not as idealistically pure as you as an enemy. That's not an effective strategy for gaining support or furthering your cause. It's a mixture of defeatism, elitism, alienation, and sanctimony.
This is something people on the right actually do really well. They are always celebrating their success and building each other up. Reading political news, I often feel like no one can tear down a Democrat quite like another Democrat. Where is the teamwork? Why don't we let our opponents attack us instead of doing their job for them?
> If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress.
Here's the full quote:
If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there.
Call me crazy, but I'm not aware of any strategy for healing a wound that doesn't involve removing the knife first.
When did I advocate for simultaneous slavery and reparations?
I know there's still a lot of change that needs to happen but I wish people would pick their head up and realize this once in a while.
So on the one hand those barriers are getting torn down slowly, which is progress in one dimension, but the economic reality is worsening for everyone. For example, people of color mighty be competing with other individuals on more level ground when it comes to getting jobs, but the supply of those jobs, the quality of life they support, and the security they afford seem to be decreasing, and the all important question isn't what it's like now, but what it'll be like on 20 or 30 years.
As a side note, worsening economic conditions can result in a flare up in racial tensions which might undo the progress that has been made.
As the internet offers greater surveillance, phone taps become less relevant.
As offshoring jobs to nations w/o union protections, where beatings and murders of organizers is less punished, working conditions in the US can improve without cutting too deeply into the bottom line... just until they close the factory.
As manual labor is increasingly done outside our borders, or by precarious undocumented immigrants, as laborer reproduction is increasingly done by their wives, more white women will be allowed into management, executive, and leadership positions. Did you notice, all the heads of the Military Industrial Complex firms are now all women? (1) What allowed this to happen?
1) https://media1.s-nbcnews.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Video/201901...
I think we look back at prior generations with rose colored glasses if we somehow think our current existence is dramatically worse than theirs.
The primary difference is that school shootings actually happen.
If you are doubtful take a look at this video the UK government put out in the seventies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXx5Y2Fr2bk
The higher you reach, the better the view and the fresher the coconuts. But more importantly, the farther you are from the sea. The next cyclone that rolls by chance sometimes washes anyone living too close to shore out to sea.
For generations, Americans took for granted that the hill was getting bigger, the slope was gentle, and each batch of kids could take a couple of easy steps forward and comfortably land somewhere safer and more prosperous than Mom and Dad.
But the last forty years or so of increasing economic disparity mean the peak of the hill gets higher and the slope up to it steeper every year. Harder and harder to climb, and easier to slip down, or get knocked down by a rival.
Meanwhile, outsourcing, offshoring and automation mean there is less and less shore near the bottom where you can start from. The sea is rising and if you can't at least reach the elevation marked "skilled worker", you better hope you're a good swimmer. (On top of this, the seas literally are rising, which will disproportionately harm the poor, just like Hurricane Katrina took out the lowest-elevation neighborhoods the worst.)
It is clear that many of the rich in power in this country don't give a damn about this. As far as they're concerned, the more people that get washed out to sea, the more coconuts there are left for them. They're so high up now, they can barely see the rest down there scrabbling to stay dry.
My hope is that a new wave of elected officials will change the direction we're heading. But right now, the future looks grim, and our childrens' anxiety is entirely rational.