20, 30 years ago, one of my aunts used to say that she saw "The American Dream" fading away. She and her husband had lived, via government jobs, in many countries. "The gap between rich and poor is widening," she'd say. "We're becoming like the countries with a few super-rich, and masses of poor people."
I, being young, thought she must be mistaken. Today, I think she was reading the tea leaves, forward direction.
In the conversation on H1Bs yesterday, I found myself conversing with a gentleman in high tech, an H1B himself. He said:
I work on a team right now where my entire QA team/infrastructure is based in 3 different American cities, and I am in a 4th. It works out just fine. I expect it would work fine even if my QA team were in 3 different Indian cities.
He said he stayed because,
"This is still the greatest country in the world; the city on a shining hill; the home of freedom.
My reply began:
With respect, I think that's a mirage, a fantasy.
If you've come to work at Microsoft or equivalent, as seems from your posts, I think you're perceiving the country through -- rose-colored glasses.
Most people in this country don't live surrounded by people with the kind of salaries, benefits and health insurance that Microsoft employees have. We just don't. I would guess that world is available to at most 5 percent of Americans right now, if that.
Have you volunteered in our schools lately? Seen how those children act and talk, and how much they work? Know what our graduation rates are? What they were 40-50 years ago? How has that change occured?
Have you driven through our ghettos lately? Stayed on the El in Chicago till you were in the Projects? So you have a visual of that embedded in your brain forever? Or even seen the low income areas of towns near you? Have you even seen the differences between playgrounds in South Seattle and Redmond / Bellevue? That alone is worth time off to see, a tour, as it were. Did you know that people in So. Seattle have gas stations that charge MORE than the suburbs do?
Have you lived in our small towns? Do you know what that grinding poverty is like? Yes I know it's not an Indian slum, but some of it is grinding, generational poverty. Then again, do you know what the magic of our small towns is -- that cities, and the kind of salaries that accrue to people in high tech can't touch? Have you seen any of that?
Have you volunteered with our foster children lately? Have you any idea how many of them there are, and what their lives are like? Before and after they enter the system? Did you know that WA puts roughly 450 18-year-olds out of foster care onto the street yearly... with their possessions in black plastic bags? Have you been to the Treehouse building, hung out with those teens, to know what American-style child trauma creates?
Have you read Jonathon Kozol's work about American education?
Did you ever SEE the segregated south? Pick-up-your chicken-in-the-back-of-the-building signs? What did it feel like to be in the south 30 years ago? Have you been on a reservation? Have you worked an orchard with migrant workers, or followed them "home" to see how they lived?
What was the Dust Bowl like for families in this country, who lost everything? What happened to families who lost everything in the Great Depression, moving into city slums? What did rationing cause during WWII here? What was it like to graduate high school during the Vietnam war, with 100 boys a week your age coming home in box or bag?
There's been a huge cultural shift in this country in the last 50 years or so. We used to have a much bigger middle class. People had decent jobs, didn't ask for a lot, didn't want to get rich, just wanted a modest home, good schooling for their children. Their jobs were secure, they worked hard. They wanted a "good life" for their children, not riches. That culture evolved from a time when many people were farmers, whose values included lots of cooperation with their local neighborhoods and communities.
Much of that has eroded. Job security eroded. The "help your neighbor" ethic eroded. School systems eroded, graduation rates have rotted. 50 million Americans with zero health coverage, parents, children, elders.
There has been a phenomenal concentration of wealth in the top percentage of American families in the last 50 years. That has meant an impoverishment for everyone else. Middle class scared -- with less, comparatively, squeezed down. Poor worse off.
Generations of children with no hope to succeed. They're not trying. You can laugh about that, the dumb American kids who aren't ready for the jobs the H1Bs can take. But as a people, to have watched our country rot out from within till many children have given up, till education is so pathetic that our children are missing out, it's been horrifying. Painful.
I think you can have no idea what living in the United States is like for most Americans right now, by virtue of being in the center of, perhaps, the 5 percent of the elite here. Even if you're just in the top 10 percent, that's a skewed view. I'm not saying this to be mean or unfriendly, instead, to open your eyes to the possibility that you are living in a remnant pocket of "what used to exist" for more Americans.
If you come here as the exception to the rule, you are vulnerable to thinking that the exception is the rule.
I would never claim to understand India, any part of the motivations of its people, what it feels like to live there, work there, what social movements are swirling there. Or where those social movements came from, where they're going. What it even feels like to touch the trees there, eat the native fruit, smell the breeze in different parts of the country.
When I was in China I wanted someone to sell everything I owned here so I could stay, because it was all so new and fascinating. But I would never be able to understand one percent of China's culture, or its varied people.
I'm trying to point out that you're in the same situation re the USA. Sure our PR is great. That bit about opportunity for all. WHEN has that ever been true?
Millions have died in squalor here, for hundreds of years, or been slaves, for the few that attained any part of "the dream". People of all races of all nations had that experience, being beaten to a pulp to build "the dream" life for a few.
Sure the freedom PR sounds great. Our freedoms have been so compromised in the last decade it's horrifying. Our lost freedoms are painful for us. Will there be a great roll-back of the laws that have compromised our freedoms? Or not?
And our wars? To help in the killing of so many people in so many countries, that we may over-consume, by stealing resources from so many? That is what builds "the shining city", the stolen resources.
Just consider these comments re the mirage.
There's a saying: "The truth will set you free."