Fair point about the median, and you're right that it should be resilient to top-heavy skew. But I think that 2.5% number is doing more heavy lifting than it deserves.
For starters, that's cumulative over roughly five years. So we're talking about 0.5% per year in real terms. (i.e. $250 for 50k) Statista's own headline on that data is "U.S. Wages Have Barely Kept Up With Inflation." For median wage that's maybe two nice dinners out a year. It's not keeping up with rent. It's not keeping up with insurance. It's definitely not a vacation.
And that gets to the bigger problem with CPI as the yardstick. CPI has been a point of contention for years, especially as it's been politically massaged to understate what people actually experience at the register. The things you cannot skip buying (housing, healthcare, food, insurance) have outpaced headline CPI by a mile. Deloitte's March 2026 consumer pulse found that discretionary spending intent dropped below the 2021 baseline. People who are genuinely better off don't cut discretionary spending. People whose essentials ate the raise do.
But the real K isn't even in income. It's in wealth. The Minneapolis Fed, U.S. Bank, and TD Economics all published analyses this year confirming the divergence is sharpest in asset appreciation and net worth, not wages. Your paycheck can be up 0.5% a year and that's technically "beating CPI," but if you don't own a home or a stock portfolio you missed the actual wealth escalator entirely. The top 10% holds something like two thirds of all equities. That's where the K really bites.
And here's the part that matches what you're seeing anecdotally about people above the median feeling squeezed. Michigan's April sentiment data shows an 11% drop across all income brackets, all age groups, all political affiliations. This isn't a bottom-of-the-ladder problem anymore. Credit card APRs went from around 16% to 22% in the same period wages "beat" CPI by half a percent a year. The raise went to Visa, not to vibes.
So I'm not saying the median number is wrong. I'm saying it's measuring the wrong thing.
It's like checking your speedometer while two of your tires are flat.
Make sense?
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You're right that I oversimplified. Property destruction has always punctuated successful movements, and I shouldn't pretend otherwise. The Tea Party, sit-ins, suffragette window-smashing. Disruption is part of the toolkit.
Having said that, your three examples all share features that don't apply here: pre-democratic conditions, no legal redress, and, crucially, organized political infrastructure that the fire punctuated rather than replaced. The colonists had no seat in Parliament, but the Sons of Liberty had been running committees of correspondence for years before the Gaspée burned. The French monarchy hadn't convened the Estates General in 175 years, but sans-culotte sections were functioning political bodies before they were rioters. Haitian slaves had no ballot, but maroon networks existed for generations before the plantations lit up. In every case, the fire was punctuation on a sentence that was already being written. A Compton warehouse worker has the right to vote, however degraded that channel is, and vastly more material standing than anyone in your three examples. Context matters.
Important to this is this is that in our current context, Chenoweth and Stephan's data (hundreds of campaigns, 1900–2006) shows nonviolent movements succeed roughly twice as often and are about 10x more likely to produce durable democratic outcomes. That's not a moral claim, it is a strategic one. The movements that actually built worker power in conditions like ours, 1930s labor, Civil Rights, the UFW, won through disciplined organizing, not arson. The ones that went the other way got the Reign of Terror and Napoleon, or a century of crippling indemnity and isolation. Fire ends things; it doesn't build them.
Where I think you're actually right is on voting. "Vote harder" alone is weak. The real lever is organized labor and sustained civic infrastructure, and the U.S. has systematically dismantled both since the 1970s. That's the fight. Celebrating fires feels like solidarity but functions as content. And content is exactly what the attention economy wants from us instead of organizing.
And when fires have come without that scaffolding, they've usually backfired. The 1968 riots after King's assassination were a human response to grief, but the political result was Nixon's "law and order" realignment, which has been shaping American politics for almost sixty years. The Weather Underground bombings hollowed out a broad New Left coalition and gave the right a permanent talking point. The 2020 property destruction is the one in living memory: BLM's public support polled higher before the arson got sustained coverage than it ever did after. The peaceful mass mobilization moved the needle. The fires moved it back. Fire without scaffolding doesn't just fail to build, it gives the other side exactly the footage they need.
If the fires are a symptom of how squeezed working people are, I'm with you. If they're being sold as the strategy, I think the historical record and the data both say we lose that way.
And look, the reason I'm pushing on this isn't to lecture anyone for feeling good about a warehouse burning. I get it. The reason I'm pushing is that the stuff that actually works is boring. Honor a picket line. Donate to a strike fund. Join a workplace organizing effort, you're legally protected to do that even without a formal union. Show up to a tenant union meeting. Vote in a municipal election where turnout is 18 percent and your ballot is worth ten. None of that trends. None of it feels like solidarity the way a fire does. But it's the stuff that built the 40-hour week, and dismantling it is what got us here. If the choice is between content that feels like power and organizing that builds it, I'd rather we pick the second one, even when it's slow.