I am 40, and I have a house, an RV, and go on a lot of vacations. I had to go to war, move 1,000 miles away from home, and work my butt off to get there. But I made it. It only took putting my life on the line.

I got asked last night at our local restaurant "how much my parents helped me to get where I was".

And maybe it just hit me wrong, but I'm still pissed off about it this morning. The answer is that my parents are both dead, and the entire contents of my inheritance was an ash tray. An ash tray that I made them when I was a kid.

When my unwed Mom had my sister in 1980 (4 years before I was born), she moved to a shitty little mobile home in a shitty trailer park 20 miles from everywhere and everything she knew and loved. She made that decision because it was cheap to do so. She was a waitress. Our next door neighbor watched us. My mom managed to pay the lot rent and trailer note. We had government food. Food stamps. All sorts of assistance. My Mom graduated high school, but never made anything of herself.

All I knew was poor as a kid. I can think of 1 time we went out to eat, and 1 time we ate McDonalds as a kid. She eventually married my step dad, and he had a Workplace injury that left him paralyzed, but the payout was enough that they moved into a home that by todays standards people would call a "starter" home in a hastily constructed neighborhood a few miles from the trailer park. They both died in their 50's from bad health. The medical debt took the proceeds from the house, which wasn't much.

My parents never had shit. None of their friends ever had shit. We were skinny because we didn't eat enough. She regularly went without eating. My Grandparents would avoid us- no kidding- because they knew they didn't have enough to feed us much, either, and they knew we were always hungry. Generational poverty exists now and existed then...

So why, may I ask, is there a narrative that prior to 30 years ago, everybody had a house, vacations, and a boat on a shoe salesman's salary? I met no one with those things growing up. We were poor, man!

Every discussion about housing, wages, and inflation of today is anchored by some claim from a 20 year old that their grandfather had a house and a second lake house and did that on a "meager" wage.

The stories that these people are telling are not the entire story, and they are VERY embellished. It's all presented transitively, too! As though all of the working poor, the poverty stricken, and the hungry kids all must have come from the same neighborhoods, that according to these young people, had the same wages being made everywhere, with the vacations and the boat. But it just isn't true. Somebody somewhere was too humble to admit that they made a lot of money at that point in time.

If you get on social media today it's as though everyone who existed and was of working age between 1960 and 1980 worked as a lowly cashier, while also owning a house, a vacation, and a boat.

But it just isn't true. There were so many poor people. And they are conveniently forgotten.

it just really upsets me that people fail to recognize that even though it may have statistically been easier to get a home due to the amount of hours needed to be worked, it wasn't as though a home was a given for a lot of people.

And as a result, not all of us are "being" helped... or ever got anything more than wanted amounted to a gift they made themselves... when their parents died.