Member-only story
Working Hard Means You Move Hard — Not Move Up
I woke up this morning with thoughts about whether I should buy more Christmas gifts. I never feel I bought enough for my loved ones. As I made my breakfast, thoughts of whether I should clean my home before or after my trip to South Carolina rattled around my head. Sitting down with my coffee and cashew yogurt (my doctor tells me to avoid dairy), I logged on to Twitter and saw this in my feed from conservative activist Kenny Xu:
Urging your friends and family to put in extra time at work, school, or on their personal projects is excellent advice. I would certainly tell people that ask me for advice that the two things that matter most are persistence and, yes, working hard.
But in a political context, it burns me up each time I see it. We need changes in social and economic policies favoring the working class and poor people. They don’t need to be told to work harder. They already do that. Probably harder than the people who jab them with this “advice.”
We have high levels of income and wealth inequality in this country. The economic differences between richer and poorer families lead to inequality of opportunity and political representation. The system needs to be fixed, not the people in it.
