The Ladder Burns Behind Them
Poetry & Prose by Britt Wolfe
They rise, not by genius,
but by scaffolding—
by grants, subsidies, teachers paid too little,
roads built by hands they will never acknowledge.
They are the children of social safety nets
who now scoff at the word safety.
The beneficiaries of public good
who sneer at the word public.
They call it self-made,
as if birth certificates were blank,
as if hospitals built by taxes
did not cradle them into being.
They build monuments to their own ambition
from bricks their mothers did not lay alone.
And then—
with the hauteur of the newly sanctified—
they strike the match.
They burn the ladder
that bore them upward,
watching the rungs curl to ash
as if immolation were integrity.
They call it fiscal responsibility.
They call it freedom.
But what they mean is:
I have escaped,
and the rest of you are flammable.
They forget the teacher who stayed late,
the nurse who steadied their mother’s shaking hand,
the social worker who spoke in soft absolutes:
you can still make it.
They forget the library,
the scholarship,
the policies they now condemn
as weakness.
Their rhetoric is inheritance denial—
the kind of delusion that turns empathy
into a line item for cuts.
They feed the myth of the market
like a jealous god,
pretending it ever loved them back.
Their reward is distance—
a gated conscience,
a balcony view of the burning below.
But history has a long memory.
It knows the scent of hypocrisy
when it rises with the smoke.
It will name them not innovators,
but arsonists—
not leaders,
but looters of the very system
that raised them.
And when the flames reach the sky,
they will finally look down,
squinting through the heat,
and see the truth they tried to bury:
that every rung they destroyed
was someone else’s first step out.
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