I’m fifty-six. I’ll be fifty-seven in less than a month. My hair is white, and my body’s not what it used to be, though in some ways it never was.
My parents were conservatives but I remember back in 1979, they thought Reagan was a bad idea. They were right, but he won, and I was 12 years old, just finished elementary school and about to go to boarding school, as my father had a job in Bangladesh, then the poorest country in the world.
Seventy-nine/eighty is when the world changed. It had been changing before: working class male wages in the US peaked in 86: there was the OPEC crisis, going off gold, stagflation, etc… But it was Thatcher and Reagan who locked in neo-liberalism, which was essentially a looting operation. Sell everything off, burn it all down, turn it into cash and damn the consequences.