Once upon a time, there was a thing called The American Dream. If you grew up in the United States you were told all you had to do was work hard and you’d attain a level of affluence, comfort and prestige unavailable anywhere else. If you emigrated to the United States, it was likely because the carrot of the American Dream was held in front of you. There are countless stories of people doing just that – putting on their “hard hat”, scraping a path through the workaday muck, fighting against difficult economic and social odds, and reaching a level of comfort that would have been otherwise unknown. For the most part, unknown anywhere else. Something we call “middle class” – the buffer between those who had “nothing” and those who had “a whole lot”.
The Dream still exists, but it’s merely word play these days. Now, hard work at multiple jobs may be all that keeps an individual, a family, or an ethnically tied group from sliding into abject poverty. It takes a long time for that to be understood by the world’s masses that emigrate in hopes of finding a better life. The lines seeking admittance into the United States are still very long, and growing numbers of those already here who are struggling for existence – who choose to forget that their families all began their history here as immigrants – don’t want any more following them. It is not a pretty situation.
The Dream still exists because politicians and would-be demigods (usually “working” in mass-media), and their controlling puppet masters proclaim that it does. Less than 1 percent of the citizenry in the United States controls the country’s wealth. The American Dream has become the American Nightmare – well on its way to the American Horror.
For tens of millions of people in this country, that Horror is already here.