Highlighting this -- and referring to all of DC's posts that followed -- to focus on exactly why we are in deep shit. We have COMPLETELY shifted the definition of "The American Dream." And we have shifted it to a definition that serves the interest of literally a handful of people at the top ("hey, we should make America a place SUPER-hospitable to people like us") at the expense of.....99% of the people who also live here.
I don't think DC is wrong - I think he is actually articulating what the current version of "The American Dream" is. That's the version that dominates our culture and our politics. The American Dream is to have the chance to make unspeakable wealth and shit on gold toilets. It's why so man of us made a literal god out of a man who had (the illusion of) wealth and gilded....everything.
We have decided that "The American Dream" is to be.....Donald Trump (or what we imagine him to be -- we have a tenuous grasp on truth these days).
That is NOT "The American Dream" that dominated our culture when I was born, and when my parents were making their way. From 1945 to 1975, what was "The American Dream?"
This:
A couple of these:
.....and an annual vacation to the beach, or Yellowstone, or the Catskills. And the ability to send your two kids to State U.
In short, a good, secure, middle class life. A life where you found happiness because by and large, Americans across the board had a good shot of acquiring what they needed, free from worry or fear about whether they'd get a next paycheck, eat a next meal, or lose everything if they got sick, etc. The American Dream was to be happy, and content.
We've said "fuck that dream." The only dream worth pursuing is the dream of making so much money you shit in gold toilets and have two yachts and treat poor people like shit because fuck them they should work harder. We gave up the achievable dream (by percentages) and went all-in on the nearly impossible dream (again, by percentages). And that's across the board, across all races, etc. Think of how many minority kids think the ONLY measure of "success" (that is, "living the dream") is to be RICH -- like a big-time rapper, or pro athlete, or the dealer down the street who always flashes rolls of cash and drives a Benz? That's f'd up. Because it's setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment and failure by a metric that you have chosen.
Should there be a chance for people to be rich? Of course. Will there always be people who end up poor? Yep. But we have utterly sacrificed happiness, contentment, and security -- which are key components to living a good and healthy life -- for the singular goal of unrealistic ambition. Ambition is good. Even being more ambitious than most can be good. But sacrificing so much -- the achievability of the house with the two car garage, the trip to the beach, and the ability to educate your kids, without fear of collapse -- for the remote goal of "the dream of being rich".....has not made us better off. See the list of happiest countries in the world:
No, we're not completely miserable. But we could do so much better. Every such survey notes a marked decline in happiness in the US since the 1970s (not coincidentally, tracking the end of our "golden age" of across-the-board rising prosperity).
We abandoned a good American Dream, once achievable by the masses, for a new American Dream, only achievable by a select few. And that dream isn't that great. Shitting in a gold toilet doesn't buy you happiness. But by buying into that dream, we have also deemed every social construct, policy, and law that serves that dream (necessarily favoring the rich) to be GOOD....and everything else that might not share that singular focus is BAD. Perhaps shift our thinking and policies to give less favor to the top 1%, but provide more opportunity and security to the middle 80%? NO. YOU AMERICA-HATING COMMIE!
Look at suicide rates. Look at life expectancy. We are literally killing ourselves. We should stop that.