You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything in your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did.

Like a lot of you, I grew up in a family on the ragged edges of the middle class. My daddy sold carpeting and ended up as a maintenance man. After he had a heart attack, my mom worked the phones at Sears so we could hang on to our house.

We don't win what we don't fight for.

What do the Republicans say? Donald Trump? They say they're just going to roll back the Dodd-Frank regulations. They want to undermine the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

I want to be blunt: We should not be fighting about equal pay for equal work, and access to birth control, in 2012. These issues were resolved years ago - until the Republicans brought them back.

If there's any lesson I've learned in the last five years, it's don't be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open.

The game is rigged to work for those who already have money and power.