What is the American Dream?
Rumonations over the jump -- crossposted to FaceBook
Stability, spouse 2.4 kids catdog white picket fence? Opportunity, the chance to succeed beyond your wildest fantasies with the concurrent risk of finding yourself living in a shotgun shack, or a cardboard box, with a spike in your arm and a cold cheeseburger filched out of a dumpster drawing flies? It is owning a home owning stocks owning a new car owning a business owning a slave owning a gun owning yourself? Is it seeing your children do better than you did? Is it getting an education a degree a certificate a bowl of mashed potatoes?
Is it even possible anymore? Was it ever?
There are plenty of people in this world who would kill to have 1/10, 1/100 of what we take for granted, people who not only don't know where their next meal is coming from but don't know if they or their children will live long enough to have to worry about something as abstract as a next meal.
Why do we feel cheated?
Is it because we can see every day the possibility of a better life? Is it because the images before us in the magazines television billboards movies newspapers set up false expectations about what is possible?
Is it because we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what has been stolen from us? Is it because prosperity has passed us by? The productivity gains of the last 40 years have not been passed on to the workers, not in the form of increased pay or increased benefits. The lean and mean vision of business is to have less people doing more. The tyranny not only of the bottom line but of the nearsightedness of only counting the bottom line for this and at most the next quarter means that short term profits will always trump long-term stability, will always put humanity, and the principle of the basic right of the worker to be treated as a human being rather than another replacable cog, in the back seat. Capitalism is working. The system that rewards thems-that-has over thems-that-does, that concentrates wealth toward the top, is winning.
The system has always been unequal. There have always been far fewer winners than losers. But the winners are now winning more and more,and the losers are now being left with less and less. It wasn't enough to take away opportunity -- there never really was all that much opportunity. But there was hope. There was hope.
It used to be possible for a normal person to do an honest day's work for an honest day's pay and live a modest lifestyle. What happened? Did everyone get greedy?
Or was greed held up to us as the only virtue, so that enough was worse than too little?
I know one thing. As we tread in our circle, yokes fastened to the wheel that grinds out the profits for those few who sit on topof the millstone, making it heavier while they sip their goldschlager and pinch the tanned flesh of their thousand-dollar-an-hour whores, we begin to realise something.
It's not just that the carrot's out of reach. It probably always has been.
But they have bound our mouths with iron and leather, and we can no longer take a bite even if we could get reach all the way to the end of the stick.
And the ropes that hold us in our traces are wearing thin, and when they snap, when they snap, the trampling will be a Terror.
If the wealthy do not voluntarily share the incredible gains they have made on our backs, it will be taken from them by force.