'Middle class' used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer.
Interpretation
The middle class, once viewed as stable and secure, now faces insecurity and change.
Elizabeth Warren's quote reflects the significant transformation in the perception of the middle class from a state of security and predictability to one of uncertainty and vulnerability. It suggests that economic stability that characterized the middle class in the past has eroded, making it harder for individuals to rely on traditional markers of success and security throughout their lives.
In practice
Discussing economic policies during a political debate.
Families rely on financial services more than ever, but those who need them most - who struggle to make ends meet - too often must contend with sky-high interest rates and tricks and traps buried in the fine print of their loan products.
There's been such a sense that there's one set of rules for trillion-dollar financial institutions and a different set for all the rest of us. It's so pervasive that it's not even hidden.
Mitt Romney is the guy who said corporations are people. No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people.
I talk to nurses and programmers, salespeople and firefighters - people who bust their tails every day. Not one of them - not one - stashes their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.
Does anyone believe that Goldman Sachs is gonna give up a deal that would yield millions of dollars because someone fussed at them behind closed doors?
We shouldn't be profiting from our students who are drowning in debt while giving a great deal to the banks. That's just wrong.
Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.
Who you think you are will always be frightened of change. But it doesn't make any difference to who you truly are.
All is change; all yields its place and goes.
I remember back in the 1960s - late '50s, really - reading a comic book called 'Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Story.' Fourteen pages. It sold for 10 cents. And this little book inspired me to attend non-violence workshops, to study about Gandhi, about Thoreau, to study Martin Luther King, Jr., to study civil disobedience.
If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play.
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