When our younger son was in third grade he fell off the monkey bars and broke his elbow. The ER doctor was flabbergasted when she heard that we were watching when it happened. She couldn’t imagine why any parent would allow a child to play on the monkey bars, an apparatus that brought the hospital quite a bit of business. At the time I was substitute teaching, and spent plenty of lunch periods watching streams of children of all ages cross the monkey bars without incident.

Our life experiences shape what we believe, and that ER doctor and I will never agree on the monkey bars since we both know what the monkey bars are really like. However, that doesn’t stop us from having a lot of other things in common.

A lot of people on the Freedom to Play on the Monkey Bars party, having lost the last election, now profess complete shock that anyone on the Prohibit Playing on the Monkey Bars party could not see things their way, yet in retrospect the outcome seems sort of inevitable.

Workers like me who were both white and white-collar in the 1990s and 2000s had a great run. Our wages were high, our subsidized 401(k) programs were burgeoning in the stock market, and we fully believed we were the vanguard of the so-called meritocracy, which of course turned out to have nothing whatsoever to do with merit.

During that same time period, politicians of all persuasions were cozying up to billionaires for contributions, removing restrictions on corporate greed and overgrowth, sending manufacturing jobs abroad, cracking down on “crimes” such as the inability to pay bail, admitting immigrants from migrant farmers to engineers to increase the employment pools for corporations from Big Ag to Silicon Valley, and sending the children of small town America to fight and sometimes die in multiple wars in the Middle East. Those who tried to change their trajectories by going to college were saddled with inexplicably nondischargeable student loans, then released into an economy in which greed-frenzied CEOs colluded to minimize both the number and the wages of their employees, unimpeded by unions, which were reeling under attacks from both government and corporations mesmerized by capitalism.

I think we are the only developed country that went full bore down the rabbit hole of worshiping capitalism. Folks who think capitalism is some sort of moral calling remind me of folks who think hunger is an emotion, except it’s not at all funny.

The gang of Prohibits in the White House is not going to make any of this better in my view. However, I can certainly understand why a lot of people who think we need to get off the monkey bars because we’re all broken decided to crash the system rather than let it spend a fourth (roughly) decade impoverishing them.

I can also understand why the Freedoms, with whom I identify, feel beset by mobs seeking to control how we worship and what we read, and to limit our medical choices, especially when it comes to vaccines, demonstrably one of the most effective public health improvements in history, yet now completely prohibited in parts of Idaho and discouraged in Florida.

Banning vaccines certainly feels like going back, waaaaay back, feels crazy, to us. Some would even say “uneducated,” but that’s not fair. For Freedoms who want to seek common ground, I would recommend you meditate on what it would feel like to have your family’s net worth and opportunity for advancement continually dropping for decades. Might you not also get tired of waiting?