Ever meet someone who discovered a great CSA? They can’t stop talking about it — Just Roots is amazing, you’ve gotta join. We all do this. I’ve been that person, too.
That’s harmless with vegetables. It’s a problem when people in power mistake their success story for everyone’s blueprint.
Look at who designs policy now. Billionaires — many who started with family money —think they’re showing you the path: work hard, take risks, you can make it, too. Credentialed professionals think they’re showing you the path: retrain, adapt, you can make it too. Same story. Winners designing policy for everyone else, assuming their escape route is everyone’s escape route.
We used to understand this differently. Social Security doesn’t care if you’re annoying at parties or made bad life choices. Medicare doesn’t care if you return library books late or know how to invest in the stock market. We figured out that basic security shouldn’t depend on being worthy — it’s just what you get.
But we forgot. We accepted that life is a competition you have to win. The old game was: work in a factory, stay in your community, lifetime employment. The new game: get credentials, be mobile, compete globally. NAFTA came, manufacturing collapsed. Working people watched their towns hollow out. The experts said: retrain, adapt, learn the new game.
Then 2008. Banks crashed the economy. The Bush administration started the bailouts, Obama continued them — bipartisan agreement that saving the system came first. Working people lost their homes. Many realized: these experts aren’t working for us.
That pattern — elites protecting themselves while working people pay — isn’t new to me. I grew up in a working-class community during the busing battles. Professional-class liberals designed policies that disrupted our schools while protecting their own. That taught me early: the people designing “solutions” often protect themselves while making working people pay the cost. That’s when I started listening to Rush Limbaugh. I get why working people listen when right wing voices call out who has power over their lives —they’re naming something real.
Eventually I came back to the left — racism is bad, climate change is real, we need universal health care. Those things are true. But I kept noticing: why does implementation always help people who already made it?
The winners protect their own position, whether they realize it or not. Look at what this produces: programs requiring people to prove they’re poor enough. 401k benefits for people who already earn enough to save. Organic food becoming a marker of who’s living right instead of what everyone gets. It’s designed like a competition — jump through the hoops, prove you’re worthy, win the prize.
Or look locally. Chapter 70 funds Massachusetts schools — giving three times more per student to wealthy districts than poor ones, according to the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. Our Mohawk Trail schools lose teachers and programs while wealthier districts stay protected. As state Sen. Jo Comerford said at a July hearing, finance committees and select boards across Franklin County are making “brutal choices” — cutting fire departments, roads, services — “all in the name of getting their kids the education that they need.”
Trump saw the opening. He told working people “you matter without the credentials, without proving yourself through their hoops.” He was right that the system is rigged. But his answer swapped one elite for another.
The real divide isn’t left versus right. It’s winners versus everyone else. The Franklin Community Co-op gets this. They acknowledged they’re seen as “a clique of aging hippies serving the well-off” and they’re adapting — lower prices, good food for everyone. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is still shopping at Whole Foods, thinking if people just learn to eat right and get the right credentials, everything works out.
The question isn’t “how do we give people pathways out?” The competition itself is wrong. Good schools, health care, housing, food — these shouldn’t be prizes you win by beating other people. They’re what everyone gets.
We’re all stuck in a Monopoly game. Someone rolled well early on, bought the right properties, and now they’re leaning back eating pretzels while the rest of us land on Park Place with nothing left. And they think they’re brilliant. They forget they just rolled better.
Here’s the thing: even if they played it perfectly, even if they had the best strategy — we don’t have to keep playing. The game’s been going on too long and everyone’s exhausted and angry. We can’t just keep it going. Universal health care, housing, living wages — where nobody’s competing, nobody’s proving they deserve it. We’ve built programs like that before. We have to demand them again.
Paul Bennett lives in Shelburne Falls. He’s a big fan of the Shelburne Falls Porch Festival.