I’m getting old
The problem is that in the past there were plentiful factory jobs... With the unions, if you somewhat kept you nose clean you could have a career, raise a family and retire to a good life. But now with overseas cheap labor there are almost no jobs like that.
Exactly. An average guy could get an average job, do an average day's work, and be paid well enough to lead a good, average life, able to relax and have family events at the Legion hall, maybe a little summer bungalow, have a wife who had time to raise the kids, have the company take care of you if you got sick or hurt, with your job waiting for you when you got better, and have a decent, average pension when it was time to retire.
Nothing too fancy, but a fair shake. And if you wanted to be a wise guy, do a little more, you could work your way up into management and drive a Buick instead of a Chevy (or a Dodge).
That's what I call the American Dream: A regular guy could work, and get a decent life in return. If you wanted to reach for the stars, fine, but the fact is, most people don't, or can't, and the point is, you shouldn't need to be special to have a normal, decent life, and in the modern, wealthy, industrial world, you shouldn't have to fight like a dog for it.
But you can't have that if you're directly competing with people who are grateful to earn $10 a day, because it's more money than they've ever seen, and don't care if they're working 14 hours a day and subject to death and severe injury on the job, or with people who are working for basically nothing as part of their "re-education" by their beloved government.
– Eric