Blog Post

They Pulled The Ladder Up Behind Them

July 4, 2026

How progress for one generation became instability for the next

A continued politics are personal series by Miss-Information

There’s a conversation that happens every single day on social media. Maybe you’ve had it. Maybe you’ve watched it. Maybe you’ve been so exhausted by it you’ve stopped trying.

An older white American — usually comfortable, usually well-meaning, usually genuinely believing they are being fair — tells you to “stop seeing race.” “Stop dividing people.” “Stop harping on problems that America has mostly solved.” “We’ve come a long way.” They say.

And they mean it. That’s the part that’s hardest to sit with.

They’re not lying. They’re not performing. From where they’re standing, on the ground they’re standing on, it genuinely looks like progress. It looks like enough.

What they can’t see — what they were never required to see — is the ladder.

They climbed it. Union jobs that paid fair wages with pensions and benefits. Houses they could afford on a single income that are now paid off. Healthcare that didn’t throw their family into bankruptcy. No student debt anchoring them to the starting line. Social Security they paid into and now collect without ever calling it a social program.

They climbed every rung. And when they got to the top, most of them didn’t pull it up out of malice.

Some pulled it up because they were told to. Misinformation dressed up as patriotism and common sense, delivered through the only screen in the living room for decades.

Some pulled it up because they genuinely never looked down. Never had to. Everything worked. Why would you question a system that works for you?

Some pulled it up out of willful ignorance. The information was always there. The stories were always there. They just chose the comfort of not knowing over the discomfort of knowing and having to act on it.

And some — yes — pulled it up because they wanted to. Because the ladder was theirs and they earned it and that was enough.

But here’s the thing about all four of those people. From the outside looking up, the result is identical.

The ladder is gone.

And we’re down here looking up at where it used to be.

Being told to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

By the people who took the ladder.

What The Ladder Was Actually Made Of

Let’s talk about what that generation actually had. Not to shame them for having it. But because you cannot have an honest conversation about bootstraps without being honest about what boots they were wearing when they said it.

They entered the workforce when unions were strong and protected workers. When your employer couldn’t just decide one day that your pension was inconvenient and dissolve it. When a manufacturing job — a real job, a dignified job — could buy a house, raise a family, take a vacation, and still have enough left over to retire on.

They bought houses when houses were buyable. When a median home didn’t cost eight to ten times a median annual salary. When a young couple could save for a few years and own something. That house is paid off now. It’s also worth ten times what they paid for it.

That’s not hustle. That’s timing. That’s the market they were handed.

They had healthcare that didn’t come with a side of bankruptcy. Medical debt is now the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States — affecting an estimated 20 million people and contributing to 62% of all bankruptcy filings.[^1]

They didn’t graduate into five- and six-figure student debt. Higher education was accessible and publicly supported. The GI Bill sent an entire generation to college on the public dime and built the postwar middle class we’re all still talking about like it was natural law instead of a policy choice.[^2]

And most of them — if they worked hard and kept their heads down — could do it on one income. One. The other parent could stay home. Or work occasionally. Or choose. That was a choice available to them. Not because they were smarter. Not because they worked harder. Because the system they lived inside was built to support them.

That system was deliberately dismantled. Trickle-down economics. Union busting. Defunding public education. Deregulating healthcare and housing markets. Death by a thousand policy cuts starting in the 1980s.[^3]

The people who had already climbed? They were fine. They were already up.

It was everyone coming behind them who hit the missing rungs.

What They Never Had To Learn

Here’s the thing about comfort. It doesn’t just protect you from hardship. It protects you from having to know.

When your neighborhood was never redlined. When your grandfather’s GI Bill actually worked for him. When your family never had a story about what happened when someone drove through the wrong town at night — you don’t go looking for those stories. Why would you? Your experience tells you the system is basically fair.

So there are things an entire generation simply never had to learn.

They never had to learn that colorblindness isn’t fairness. That saying “I don’t see race” in a country built on race doesn’t erase racism — it just makes you blind to it while it keeps running. You cannot fix what you refuse to see.

They never had to learn what the Black Panthers actually were. Because they were told. J. Edgar Hoover called them the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States. That’s what the news said. That’s what the government said. So that’s what they believed.

What the news didn’t lead with — what required looking — was what the Black Panthers were actually doing in their communities. Free breakfast programs feeding more than 20,000 children every morning before school by 1969. Health clinics. Gang truces. Coalitions across racial lines.[^4] In a 1969 Senate hearing, the administrator of the National School Lunch Program acknowledged that the Panthers were feeding more low-income children than the entire State of California.[^4]

Fred Hampton was 21 years old. He was so dangerous — so threatening to the internal security of the United States — that FBI agents and Chicago police conducted a pre-dawn raid on his apartment on December 4, 1969, and shot him dead in his bed.[^5] Asleep. In his own home. At 21. His pregnant fiancée was lying next to him. Police fired over 90 shots. [^5]

For feeding children.

And those breakfast programs were so effective that historians have documented them as both the model for and the direct political pressure behind the permanent federal School Breakfast Program that children eat from today.[^4]

They were never told that part.

Meanwhile, the Ku Klux Klan — founded in 1865, responsible for documented lynchings, bombings, murders, and domestic terrorism for more than 150 years — has never once been formally designated a domestic terrorist organization by the federal government. The U.S. has no domestic terrorism statute that allows such a designation. They still exist. They still march. Openly. In American streets.[^6]

One organization fed children and got their leaders killed in their sleep.

One organization terrorized and murdered for 150 years and kept marching.

That is not ancient history. That is policy-shaped memory.

And then there’s gender identity. When a doctor looked at a baby and made a call in the delivery room, that generation never had to think about it again. The question was answered before it was ever asked.

They didn’t learn about transgender people because the research was burned. Literally burned.

The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin — founded in 1919 by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the world’s first institute dedicated to the scientific study of gender and sexuality — was raided by Nazi youth brigades on May 6, 1933. More than 20,000 books, patient records, and research documents were hauled into the street and set on fire.[^7] It was among the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings. That iconic image — the pile of burning books in the square — is largely made up of Hirschfeld’s archive.[^7]

We would know so much more than we do today if that library had survived.

And if you want to understand how deliberately that knowledge was suppressed — and what happens when a government decides a community needs to be erased — I wrote about it in The Conveyor Belt. Because what happened in 1920s and 1930s Germany wasn’t random. It was a system. Declare them a problem. Strip their documentation. Erase their history. Then act like they never existed in the first place.

Sound familiar.

A joke about not knowing what a female is isn’t just ignorant. It’s the end product of a deliberate erasure that started almost a century ago.

They didn’t know because someone made sure they wouldn’t.

person holding smartphone — Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

The Phone In Their Pocket

Here’s where grace starts to run thin.

Because everything we just talked about — the Black Panthers, Fred Hampton, the burned books, the history, the pipeline — all of it is available right now. Instantly. For free. In their pocket.

Every declassified FBI document about COINTELPRO. Every study on colorblind ideology. Every piece of transgender medical research that survived the burning. Every name. Every story.

It’s all there.

And yes — some of it is a genuine technology gap. Navigating algorithms, fact-checking sources, knowing the difference between a credible article and a meme designed to manipulate you — that’s a learned skill. Not everyone has it.

Some of it is the algorithm itself. If you spend enough time clicking on one kind of content, the machine learns and feeds you more. Fox News to Facebook groups to YouTube rabbit holes to a completely sealed information ecosystem that confirms everything you already believed and calls everything outside it fake. That’s not entirely their fault. That’s a designed system. Built that way on purpose. It works exactly as intended.

But.

Some of it is a choice. A daily, renewable choice to not look. To see a comment full of facts and history and respond with “I’m not going to read your entire comment.” To have the receipts handed to you and put them down unopened.

That is willful ignorance. And willful ignorance in 2026 with a smartphone in your hand is a different thing than not knowing in 1965 when the television told you what to think and that was that.

You don’t get the same grace for not knowing when the knowing is one tap away.

And our generations — the ones still climbing, the ones who never found the ladder, the ones working two and three jobs without pensions or affordable healthcare or any of the scaffolding that built their comfortable lives — we are living with the consequences of that choice not to look.

Every single day.

You Have To Want To Learn

I want to tell you something about myself.

I didn’t know about Japanese internment camps from school.[^8] I didn’t learn about the Tulsa Black Wall Street Massacre from a textbook.[^9] Nobody taught me the truth about the Black Panthers, or about the thriving LGBTQ+ community in 1920s Berlin, or about the Native children stolen from their families and forced into boarding schools — the reason generational trauma runs so deep in Native communities today, the reason so much of their culture came so close to being lost forever.[^10]

I didn’t learn those things because someone put them in front of me.

I chose to learn them.

I watched the documentaries. I dug further. I sat with the discomfort of realizing that the version of history I was handed was incomplete at best and deliberately curated at worst. Iron Jawed Angels is one of my favorite films — the story of what the suffragette movement actually looked like, what those women actually endured for my right to vote. A right I still see as a privilege I am obligated to honor every single time.

I chose that. Nobody made me.

And I want to be clear — I’m not exceptional for doing it. I’m not smarter or more virtuous than anyone else in this conversation. I’m a white disabled woman living in a van with a Saint Bernard and a Substack. I don’t have resources or credentials or a platform beyond the one I built one piece at a time.

What I have is curiosity. And the willingness to be wrong. And the understanding that knowing more — even when it’s uncomfortable, especially when it’s uncomfortable — makes me better equipped to show up for people whose privileges I carry and they don’t.

Because here’s what all that learning gave me. I know what happened before. I know what the pipeline looks like when it starts running. I know where my privilege is and exactly where it ends. And I know how to use what I have to advocate for people who don’t have it.

That’s not a burden. That’s the whole point.

The documentaries exist. The books exist. Eldorado is on Netflix. There are documentaries about the Black Panthers, about Tulsa, about Native boarding schools, about the suffragette movement, about Japanese internment. They are there. Waiting.

All it takes is the want and the willingness to be uncomfortable.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Those two conditions together are what separate knowing from not knowing in 2026 when everything is available and nothing is hidden.

You can have the want without the willingness. Plenty of people do. They want to understand — but only up to the point where understanding requires admitting they were wrong. Where it requires sitting with the fact that the world they thought was basically fair wasn’t. That the ladder they climbed was built on policies that excluded people who looked different or loved differently or were born into the wrong body or the wrong zip code.

That’s where people turn the documentary off.

That’s where they put the comment down unread.

The willingness to be uncomfortable is the price of actually knowing. And it’s the one thing nobody can make you pay. You have to choose it.

And when they don’t?

You post anyway.

Post Anyway

So what do you do when they won’t look?

When they say they’re not going to read your whole comment. When they pivot to personality instead of engaging with the facts. When they call it rage when there was no rage. When they close the door before you can finish the sentence.

You post anyway.

Not for them. Or at least — not only for them.

You post for the person scrolling who needed to see a name written down by someone who wasn’t going to let it be forgotten. You post for the person who has been called crazy for knowing what they know and needed someone to confirm they aren’t. You post for the young person still forming their understanding of the world who stumbles into that thread and finds facts laid out plainly instead of anger and noise.

You post for the person still on the fence. The one who isn’t all the way there yet but isn’t all the way gone either. The one who has been uncomfortable with some of what they’ve been told but hasn’t had the language or the history to push back yet. You give them the language. You give them the history. You leave it there for them to find.

This is something I learned from years of showing up in other spaces. On sidewalks. At demonstrations. In rooms where the people who most needed to hear what was being said weren’t the ones standing in front of me.

You don’t always get to see who you reach. Most of the time you don’t. You show up and you fill the space with truth and you trust that it lands somewhere even when you can’t see where.

The comment section is no different. You are not going to reach everyone. Some people have made the choice — conscious or not — to stay comfortable. To keep the ladder pulled up. To not pay the price of discomfort that knowing requires.

That’s not yours to fix.

What’s yours is the truth. The facts. The names. The history. The stories — including your own. Those are yours to put into the space and leave there.

Because sometimes it works.

Sometimes the person who said they weren’t going to read your comment reads every single one. Likes each one quietly. Ends the conversation saying they didn’t know that bit of history. Asks where they can learn more.

You don’t get to know in advance which conversations those will be. So you show up for all of them. You stay calm. You bring the receipts. You leave the door open. You don’t shame people out of the conversation when there’s still a chance they might walk through it.

And when they do — even just a crack, even just one moment of “I didn’t know that” after an entire thread of resistance — you don’t gloat. You just open the door wider.

Here are the documentaries. Here are the books. Here’s what it feels like to sit in the discomfort of learning something that rewrites what you thought you knew.

It’s okay that it’s uncomfortable. It’s supposed to be. That’s how you know it’s working.

You will never learn why things are the way they are if you only look at what you have or don’t have today.