We love the story of the kid who made it out.

We never, we rarely look at all the children who don't, who are just as capable.

And I think that that's what Desani's story forces us to do is to understand why versus how.

How you get out isn't the point. It's why do so many not.

Hello and welcome to Wise's Happening with me, your host, Chris Hays.

You know, the US, if you go back to Detokeful and before that, the Declaration, the Founders,

you know, they're very big on civic equality, right? They think like this is the big,

the big, all-menor created equal creed is what distinguishes the US, what gives it its sort of

moral force and righteousness in rebelling against the Crown. And of course, the obvious thing that

many people at the time noted was that, you know, there were over a million people in bondage

at the same time. They were saying this, and even as you move into the 1820s and 30s, when you have

fights over sort of Jacksonian democracy and kind of popular sovereignty and will, you're still

just talking about essentially white men with with some kind of land, some kind of ownership and

property rights. So civic equality is often honored in the breach, but there is a fact that early on

there is a degree of material equality in the US that is quite different from what you find in

Europe. And then of course, over time, what happens in the United States is that we become less

and less material equal. We get the Arabian, the Arabian, the Industrial Revolution. We have a

period where, basically from the New Deal to 1980 inequality in the country shrinks and then the

story, as you well know, from 1980 and now is this skyrocketing inequality. There's a bunch of

ways to look at that picture. It's sort of prismatic because as you're talking about the separation

of a nation in terms of its material, its level of material comfort or discomfort, right? Or

material that want, there's a million different stories to tell what that looks like. Like you

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