A Letter to My Children
Why I started 2B.org. Why I wrote the 2B Declaration. And why we launched it on MLK Day, 2026.*
To my dear, dear children,
There will come a day, maybe when you're my age, maybe sooner, when you will ask what everyone did when everything fell apart.
I have imagined that conversation a thousand times.
I have dreaded it a thousand more.
This letter is my answer.
The Promise
Before you were born, I made you a promise.
Every parent makes it. Most never say it out loud, but it is there, silent and sacred, from the very first precious moment we hold you in our arms:
I will give you the best life I can. I will leave you a better world than I found.Your great-great-grandparents made that promise. They fled countries that offered them nothing so their children could have something. They crossed vast oceans to reach a shining city on a hill, arriving with empty pockets and full hearts, embracing a nation that promised to embrace all who yearned to be free. And they built.
Your great-grandparents made that promise. They survived great depressions and even greater wars. They sacrificed everything – everything - because the promise demanded it.
Your grandparents made that promise. They worked jobs that broke their bodies and perhaps even their souls, so their children could work jobs that didn't.
And, for one hundred and fifty years, that promise held.
Parents believed—truly believed—that if they worked hard enough, sacrificed enough, loved enough, their children would have more. Not because they were naive. Because it was true. Wages rose. Doors opened. The middle class grew. The promise was kept.
Then something broke.
Not by accident.
Not by fate.
Not by the invisible hand of some neutral market.
It was broken by hands that knew exactly what they were doing. By people who decided that their wealth mattered more than your future. By a generation that looked at the promise their parents made and said: Not for these children. For us.
What Was Taken
I do not know how to tell you this gently, so I will tell you truly.
Since 1975, more than a decade after I was born, workers in this country became sixty percent more productive. They worked harder than their parents. They worked smarter than their parents. They created more value than any generation in human history. And yet, despite all this, do you know how much more they were paid? Almost nothing.
Fifty trillion dollars. $50,000,000,000,000! ¹Read that number aloud. Sit with that number. Let that number settle into your bones. It is not a typo. It is not an exaggeration. It is not a talking point designed to provoke. It is the truth.
Fifty trillion dollars was taken from American families - families like ours - and transferred to people who already had more than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes. ²
It was taken from your teachers. It was taken from your coaches. It was taken from the parents of your friends. It was taken from the nurse who held your Mom's hand when you were born. It was taken from the mechanic who kept our cars running. It was taken from every person who ever showed up, did their job, and believed the promise.
They called it efficiency. They called it innovation. They called it the market. They called it inevitable.
But I call it what it is. Theft.
They stole your inheritance.
They stole it while you were sleeping. They stole it while your grandparents were too exhausted from working two jobs to notice. They stole it in boardrooms with leather chairs and in legislatures with marble floors. They stole it with handshakes and signatures, with 'laws', and lobbyists and loopholes. And they told themselves it was just business.
And now?
Now life expectancy in America is falling. In the richest nation in the history of human civilization, our people are dying younger than their parents.
Now half your generation – half - reports persistent sadness or hopelessness. I read that statistic and I wept. Not for a political cause. For you.
Now that great and sacred promise lies imperiled. Will you be the first generation in American history to inherit less hope, less freedom, less of the illumination of freedom than the generation before?
I need you to understand something:
This is not because resources ran out. This is not because the work got harder. This is not because of anything you did or failed to do.
This is because we, the people of these prior generations, chose this. Knowingly or unknowingly, we chose this future for you.
And I am not okay with that. I am not okay.
The Night I Decided
There was a night, I do not remember the exact date, but I remember the feeling, when I stood in your doorway and watched you sleep.
You were so small.
So beautiful.
So unaware of everything waiting for you.
I thought about the world I was supposed to hand you. I thought about the promise I made the moment I first held you. And I realized, standing there in the dark, that I was breaking it.
Every day I stayed silent, I was breaking the promise. Every day I accepted "that's just how things are," I was breaking the promise. Every day I looked away from what I knew to be true, I was breaking the promise every parent makes.
I wept that night.
Not for myself.
For you.
Because I saw where this was heading. I saw the graphs trending downward. I saw the studies confirming what I already felt. I saw the data, cold and unforgiving, and I knew - I knew - that unless something changed, I would hand you a world worse than the one I was given.
That is an unbearable thought.
There is a question from Shakespeare that echoed in my mind through all those sleepless nights:
"To be, or not to be?"Most people think it is about whether to live or die. It is not. It is far more profound than that. It is about whether to truly live, to engage with the world's pain, to fight even when you might lose, to love so fiercely that you cannot stand still. Or whether to simply exist… To go through the motions. To look away because looking hurts too much.
For too long, too many have looked away. I myself thought the problems were too big. I myself thought the system was too powerful. I myself thought my voice was too small.
I told myself someone else would fix it. Someone smarter. Someone wealthier. Someone braver than me.
But, there is no someone else. There is only us.
There is no other time. There is only now.
And so I made a choice.
I chose to be.Not just to exist, but to fight. Not just to witness, but to act. Not just to hope, but to build something worth hoping for.
That is why I founded 2B.
That is why I wrote the Declaration of Shared Prosperity.
And that is why, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the year 2026, I launched a movement to reclaim what was stolen and restore the promise that was broken.
The King They Erased
They do not teach you the real Dr. King in school.
They teach you the dreamer. They teach you the "I Have a Dream" King. They teach you the safe King - the one whose words can be printed on coffee mugs and quoted in corporate diversity trainings without threatening anyone's profits or disturbing anyone's comfort.
But they do not teach you what he said exactly one year before he was assassinated, to the very day, standing in The Riverside Church with fire in his voice and prophecy on his tongue:
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."Spiritual death!
Not economic decline. Not political instability. Not a temporary setback on the road to progress. The death of who we are. The death of what we were meant to be.
They do not teach you that when the bullet found him, Dr. King was in Memphis, standing with sanitation workers who dared to demand the oh so radical notion of a living wage...
They do not teach you that he was planning a Poor People's Campaign to bring thousands to Washington and stay there, occupying the corridors of power, until Congress addressed the economic injustice that made political freedom meaningless.
A bullet killed Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4th, 1968. But something worse happened that day. That bullet killed what he was building, and what survived was sanitized. Defanged. Made safe for mass consumption. His most sincere and sacred demand, that this wealthy nation actually share its prosperity with the people who created it, was quietly, conveniently forgotten.
So in honor of that great, great man, I chose MLK Day to launch our Declaration.
Because someone must continue what they silenced.
Because someone must continue the work that says you cannot have civil rights if you cannot afford to exercise them.
Because someone must champion the truth that democracy cannot survive when it is for sale to the highest bidder.
Because someone must remind this nation that our true measure is not how we reward the wealthy, but how we treat everyone.
And, because I made a promise. To you.
They killed him for this work. The least I can do, the least we all can do, is continue it.
What We Are Doing
I want you to know the plan.
I want you to know I am not shouting into the void.
On MLK Day 2026: I published the 2B Declaration to the world. It lives. It breathes. The movement has begun. On January 27, 2026: Over one hundred and eighty journalists covering economic justice, labor, artificial intelligence, and democracy will receive our story. Our message to them is simple: This is the defining issue of our time. Cover it. On February 3, 2026: More than five thousand elected officials, federal and state, in every corner of this country, will receive formal notice. Notice that we exist. Notice that we are watching. Notice that we will hold them accountable for every vote, every silence, every choice, and every sacred promise broken. Every day after: We will track who responds. We will track who ignores. We will make our voices public. We will make it impossible to pretend they did not know.This is not a petition that will gather dust. This is not a hashtag that will trend and fade. This is not a moment that will pass.
This is the beginning.
I Do Not Know If We Will Win
I must be honest with you.
I do not know if we will succeed.
I do not know if the system is too captured. I do not know if the money is too powerful. I do not know if the inertia is too heavy. I do not know if too many souls have already died.
I do not know if I am building something that will last or something that will be forgotten by the next news cycle.
But I know this:
I cannot look you in the eyes someday and say I did nothing.I cannot explain that the problems were too big, so I gave up. I cannot explain that the system was too entrenched, so I went along. I cannot explain that I saw the storm coming and chose comfort over courage.
Every generation that ever bent the arc of history toward justice faced longer odds than we do.
They were outgunned. They fought anyway. They were outspent. They fought anyway. They were outlawed. They fought anyway. They were beaten and jailed and killed. They fought anyway.
They lost battles. They kept fighting.
And eventually, sometimes long after they were gone, they won.
The Declaration I wrote is not complicated. It does not require a law degree or an economics degree to understand. It says simply:
Life comes before profit. People come before shareholders. Communities come before capital. The planet comes before quarterly returns. Democracy comes before the highest bidder.It says that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are our inalienable rights.
It says that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.
These are not radical ideas.
These are the foundational ideas of America itself.
They are the ideas that built the middle class. They are the ideas your ancestors crossed oceans to embrace. They are the ideas Dr. King lived for and died demanding.
They are the ideas we abandoned.
But they are the ideas we can choose again.
To Everyone Else Reading This
You found your way here somehow.
Maybe through a link. Maybe through a friend. Maybe the algorithm, in its mysterious workings, brought you to this page.
But you are still reading.
Which means something in you recognizes something in this letter. That gnawing feeling in your gut that the game is rigged. That sense that the future is being stolen in broad daylight while we are told to look the other way. That voice whispering that someone, somewhere, should do something.
You are that someone. This is that somewhere. Now is that time. Read the Declaration. If it speaks to your spirit, join The Surge, an immovable network of people ready to act when the moment demands it.Share this letter with one person who needs to hear it.
The promise our parents made is not dead.
It is dormant, yes.
But it waits.
It waits for enough of us to remember who we are.
Finally, To My Children
I do not know what world you will inherit.
I do not know if I will live to see the change we are fighting for.
I do not know if you will have to finish what I started.
I do not know if you will read this letter someday as a record of victory or as a testament to a fight that was not enough.
But I know this:
I will spend every single day I have left on this earth trying to keep the promise I made you.
I will not hand you a broken world and shrug. I will not tell you "that's just how things are." I will not teach you to accept what should never be accepted. I will not look up at the stars and yawn…
I will fight.
For you.
For the world you deserve.
For the promise.
That, my loves, is my answer.
With all my love, always and forever,
Dad
Endnotes
¹ Price, Carter C. and Kathryn A. Edwards, "Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018," RAND Corporation, WR-A516-1, September 2020. The study found that from 1975 to 2018, Americans earning below the 90th percentile lost $47 trillion in aggregate income compared to what they would have earned had post-war income distributions held steady. At the pace of approximately $2.5 trillion per year, that figure crossed $50 trillion by early 2020. Available at RAND.org
² Hanauer, Nick and David Rolf, "The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure," TIME, September 14, 2020. This analysis contextualizes the RAND findings, noting that the $2.5 trillion annual shortfall equals nearly 12 percent of GDP—enough to pay every working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 per month. Available at TIME.com