I keep seeing it scroll past.
“General strike.”
“Shut it all down.”
“Nothing changes until we stop working.”
It shows up between pictures of kids’ lunches, half-finished craft projects, someone’s dog doing something earnest. Always urgent. Always righteous. Always just out of reach.
And I kept wondering why.
Not in a cynical way. In a genuinely confused way. If things are really this bad — and for a lot of people they are — why hasn’t it happened? Why haven’t Americans, even briefly, collectively said no?
I don’t think it’s because people are lazy.
Or apathetic.
Or stupid.
I think it’s because the cost is too high — and not in the way we usually talk about.
Most of the people I know aren’t living paycheck to paycheck because they’re reckless. They’re living that way because everything else has been carefully removed.
Savings don’t exist for most families.
Pensions are mostly gone.
Healthcare is tied to employment.
And quietly — almost politely — retirement has been moved somewhere else entirely.
Into the stock market.
It took me a while to see it, because it’s presented as empowerment. Ownership. Participation. Planning for the future.
But what it really does is make resistance feel like self-harm.
If your retirement lives in the market, then a strike isn’t just a protest — it’s a gamble against your own future. A crash doesn’t hurt “them.” It hurts you. The years you already worked. The decades you already gave.
So when someone says “shut it all down,” what a lot of people hear is:
Risk everything you’ve already survived for.
And then there’s Social Security.
People talk about it like it’s outdated. Or inefficient. Or something we might not “need” anymore.
But here’s what I realized:
Social Security is the last place in American life where survival after work isn’t tied to market behavior.
It doesn’t go up because you were obedient.
It doesn’t vanish because you protested.
It doesn’t care what Wall Street thinks of you.
It’s not luxurious. It’s not generous.
It’s indifferent — and that’s its power.
If it disappears, retirement becomes permission-based. Conditional. Volatile.
At that point, no one has to threaten you to keep you in line. The system does it for them.
This isn’t slavery the way history books describe it.
It’s quieter than that.
It’s knowing that the wrong kind of instability — even instability aimed at fixing things — could erase the only future you’ve been allowed to imagine.
It’s why so many people are angry and frozen at the same time.
They aren’t unwilling to sacrifice.
They’ve already sacrificed.
What they can’t afford is to sacrifice the past too.
So when I see calls for a general strike now, I don’t roll my eyes.
I feel sad.
Because I think the reason it hasn’t happened is also the reason it feels necessary.
And until that contradiction is faced — honestly, structurally — shouting louder won’t make it real.
Miss Ordinary doesn’t have a solution.
But she does think it helps to name the cage correctly.
