Look at what happened to this country over the last forty years. We traded an honest, blue-collar backbone for pure, hollow consumption, and American television tracked every step of our decline right on schedule.
Go back to the sixties and seventies. Television actually looked and felt like regular working folks. Ralph Kramden was grinding out a living behind the wheel of a city bus. Archie Bunker worked down on the loading dock. Mel's Diner was just an everyday greasy spoon where waitresses split tips to make rent. Lucy lived in an ordinary, cramped apartment on a bandleader's unpredictable paycheck. And Black programming didn't try to hide behind fake high-society fronts, either. Fred Sanford was out in Watts running an oily junk empire out of a pickup truck. Florida and James Evans were in the Cabrini-Green high-rise projects in Chicago, scraping pennies together just to keep the lights on and the food on the table. Even George Jefferson—a man who worked his tail off until he owned seven dry-cleaning locations—spent years living in a modest two-bedroom flat before moving on up. Nobody felt embarrassed to be working class. Living modestly, staying unionized, and looking out for your neighbors was the gold standard.
Then Ronald Reagan walked into the White House in 1981, and the script flipped overnight.
Almost instantly, being filthy rich became the only acceptable goal in American life. Gone were the working-class families trying to make an honest week count. Networks shoved Dallas down our throats, parading Texas oil barons backstabbing each other over drilling rights, and Dynasty, showing rich folks sipping vintage champagne in crystal ballrooms. On our side of the screen, the working-class Black family vanished into thin air. We got handed The Cosby Show—a doctor married to an elite corporate lawyer, raising kids inside a spotless, multimillion-dollar Manhattan brownstone. They sold us the fantasy that if you weren’t living large, you just weren't trying hard enough.
Meanwhile, back in the actual streets, our neighborhoods caught fire. Crack cocaine and military-grade automatic weapons flooded our communities—brought in straight through covert pipelines exposed during Iran-Contra. Real manufacturing jobs got packed up and shipped overseas. Plant after plant padlocked its gates. Unions got dismantled with the stroke of a pen. But instead of pointing the finger at the politicians and agencies orchestrating the destruction, we got conditioned to look down on the people stuck in the projects. We turned into a society that worshiped the dollar and clowned the person struggling to survive.
By the nineties, the hustle turned into an absolute casino. Wall Street pushed straight paper games called derivatives. Phil Gramm and his buddies gutted the Glass-Steagall Act with the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, pulling down the firewall between commercial banks holding your hard-earned savings and the Wall Street gamblers betting against them. They created trillions in counterfeit financial smoke. When the new millennium hit, they gave us nine-eleven to justify turning the country inside out. They passed the Patriot Act, took our civil liberties, drained trillions into endless foreign wars off the official books, and then blamed regular working folks when the whole crooked subprime housing bubble finally burst in 2008.
Then came the 2010s. Social media hit full stride and turned every man, woman, and child into a self-promoting brand. Reality TV took over the airwaves—Real Housewives and Love & Hip Hop—normalizing women brawling on camera over designer purses and grown men renting supercars just to take thirty-second clips for the timeline. Community died a quiet death. We traded real brotherhood, front-porch conversations, and block associations for followers, clout, and algorithmic dopamine hits.
Then 2020 arrived, and the trap snapped shut. Small businesses by the tens of thousands were forced to shutter their doors while the world's biggest corporations vacuumed up historic market share. Wall Street private equity giants quietly bought up entire zip codes of single-family starter homes right under our noses. That’s what they call the Great Reset—and it isn't some far-off theory anymore, it is our day-to-day reality right now in 2026.
Think about where we stand. You don't own the home you live in; you rent from an investment conglomerate. You don't own your car features; you pay a monthly digital subscription to turn on the heated seats. You don't own the songs, movies, or software you pay for; you rent access through a server that can lock you out tomorrow. Even eating dinner out requires scanning a digital barcode on your smartphone. The entire system is engineered to keep regular folks perpetually broke, completely isolated from one another, utterly dependent on five tech platforms for basic survival—and thanking them for making it convenient.
Look at what passes for entertainment today.
It tells on itself every single hour. Popular music stands for absolutely nothing. Major labels push drill tracks where teenagers murder their classmates over social media disses and rap about it like a game. The other half pushes unfiltered raunchiness masquerading as modern empowerment. There is no soul left in the rotation. No Curtis Mayfield warning us about Freddie’s dead. No Marvin Gaye asking what’s going on in the streets. No Public Enemy telling folks to fight the powers that be. We traded conscious lyricism for pure shock value and disposable eight-second clips meant to keep your eyes glued to a glass screen while the landlord raises your rent another twenty percent.
We sit around arguing on social media about petty culture-war topics while the ruling class quietly buys up the farmland, the fresh water aquifers, and the medical infrastructure. We scream at each other over red versus blue, forgetting that both political wings belong to the exact same bird and answer to the exact same corporate donors.
We let them convince us that chasing paper was the same thing as being free. We traded solidarity for flexing, and now the bill has arrived.
