Walking It Back

It’s not just the rich taking from the poor, it’s also the old taking from the young (And then they tell them to stop complaining about it) If you’re not pissed off you’re not paying attention https://t.co/edDqBxCPsH

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) October 10, 2026

"Wealth" defined as property has always been disproportionately distributed to the old, who are more likely to accumulate it. The house I’m sitting in is paid for,  which means I have that much more wealth (no debt) than I had for nearly 40 years. It has also increased in value, adding to my “wealth” without me doing a thing except being fortunate. (My grandparents moved from the house I knew in childhood to another because the neighborhood declined.  My grandfather worked all his life, and if I had lived as long as he did, I’d be three years dead. He never accumulated any real wealth. Not by this standard.) My father accumulated more wealth than his father ever had. I’m pretty sure that the post-war years were the aberration in American history, and we foolishly let it revert to the mean. States made education available, and Boomers took advantage of it. My education kept me away from stoop labor (I did enough of that between semesters), but it better me up for life.  So we (the Boomers) decided education was too expensive, and not producing enough “A” students, so we quit investing in it. Well, except for our kids. You know, Hid fearing white kids. Rich white people don’t want to pay to educate non-whites.

And Boomers all but invented generational animosity. “The Grneration Gap.” “Never trust anyone over 30.” We sowed the dragon’s teeth; now we reap the whirlwind.  But the lesson of the Prodigal applies here, too. Impatient child that he was, he told his father to give him his inheritance while he was young and could enjoy it. The framing in that tweet has some of that flavor. 

I worked hard all my life, suffered many setbacks and reversals. I’ve fallen ass backwards into a retirement I never really anticipated. Should I apologize to people under 35 who are being forced backwards? More properly I should sympathize, because I went through that when I was under 35. What, you thought everything came up roses until 2000?

I mean: “Been there, done that.” But why should you go through it? It was unjust and unfair when I had to struggle with it, and that struggle didn’t “make me a man.” It was bullshit. It was a broken system working for the benefit of the system and the few, not for people and all of us. So the real problem is not the rich taking from the poor (oh, they are; but “poor” is a very relative term in that analysis), or the old taking from the young (as my parents and grandparents and ancestors built the world I enjoyed in youth, do too I built it for today’s youth). But that raises the question: could it have been built more equitably?

Aye, there’s the rub. It’s not always a matter of taking; sometimes it’s a matter of structuring. Maybe it’s a matter of restructuring; and if I need to make some sacrifices to make this society more equitable, I will.

But there’s the other rub, the one Niebuhr recognized: a society cannot require sacrifice for meaning and belonging. That’s coercion, not morality. Except, of course, we do require sacrifice by some, so the rest of us can be comfortable. This is Omelas, after all.

Maybe, instead of bitching about who has and who has not, we address that root problem. It’s not like we can walk away. And we don’t have to act like the bargain of Omelas us absolute and irrevocable.