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.

Hope used to mean something different. It used to mean collective progress. Solidarity. We marched for better wages. We fought for civil rights. We built schools and unions and co-ops. We didn't dream of becoming the landlord. We fought to make rent fair for everyone. But now even our dreams are privatized. We traded shared ambition for selfish aspiration. And we're losing the plot.

I grew up hearing stories from my grandfather, who was one of 13 kids in a sharecropping family. One generation later, he owned 40 acres, grew tobacco, raised cattle, had houses to rent out to his kids. That wasn't just personal grit. That happened because America was actually building things back then. The TVA brought electricity to our region. The interstate highways connected us to the world. There were pathways to a better life that didn't require winning the lottery.

The pathways to prosperity were dismantled. I know because I watched it happen. My woodworking company made furniture components for Lazy Boy, Berkline, Universal, and Vaughn Furniture before NAFTA and CAFTA gutted us. It wasn't just my business. Our whole region got hollowed out while corporate America chased cheap labor overseas.

The pathways to prosperity were dismantled... Our whole region got hollowed out while corporate America chased cheap labor overseas.

The knowledge walked out the door with the last shift supervisor. Towns that had built middle-class prosperity around making things became ghost towns. Skills that took generations to develop got thrown away because some MBA in New York decided labor was cheaper in Mexico. We went........

© Common Dreams