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We Americans are spoiled and our expectations have grown too high. Our disease has become an epidemic. Perhaps we need to wake up to how the rest of the world lives. But not only are we spoiled; in spite of our wealth, it seems that increasingly we have become a nation of self-proclaimed victims - a phenomenon that has led others around the world to see us increasingly as a culture of whiners.
A few years ago, I had caught bits of a cable news program demonstrating the telltale signs of this growing American malady. Commentator Lou Dobbs was hosting another of his televised series of town halls to incite his audience, lamenting the fact that the American Dream was no longer available to a majority of our middle-class citizens.
Well, what did he expect? Must every American's dream come true? Does Lou Dobbs want a government guarantee? Do we need a government take-over? Wasn't that the old Soviet model? Even if this American Dream is achievable, and there is sufficient equality of opportunity in the USA to pursue it, does everyone have the right to expect fulfillment of his or her dreams?
I recently read that the American Dream is a myth overdue for revision. Maybe so; or perhaps this dream has always been just that - a dream. And it will continue to remain so for many Americans simply because this dream, or myth, is not static, but an ever-changing goal painted by expert marketing professionals who encourage us to want and expect more than we can ever afford. Then just at the moment when we believe we have arrived at the horizon of our dream, the marketers move it farther away from us.
The great majority of our citizens have only been able to participate, albeit marginally, in this dream by living on debt. This is no dream; it is more like a nightmare, with debt as far as the eye can see - mortgages, credit cards, insurance premiums, taxes, defaults, lawsuits, bankruptcies. What other dreams can this great country devise for its citizens? How much longer can the evanescent promises of our "cowboy capitalism" persist, until finally collapsing in upon itself? It seemed to me that Dobbs' program was nothing more than our national cult of victimization now running at a fevered pitch, stirring an already boiling pot of chronic American disenchantment. And leading, in the end to global financial collapse.
Had not America originally been populated by disenchanted immigrant forebearers who, out of frustration over their own victimization, set sail for the New World with the intention of ending their persecution and rectifying the wrongs that had been inflicted upon them by older religious and political hierarchies. Lest we forget the words etched on Lady Liberty, the idol of the new motherland:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to be free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me...
So America became the land of victims, those seeking refuge, and later of quick fixes for all those who felt victimized still. Did not these very same victims, seeking a new life in the New World then turn right around and inflict the same or worse injustices, victimizing others right here in their New Jerusalem? Think of the American Indian, those "savages;" think of the settlers' own puritanical women-folk, those "witches." Perhaps there is something about the values underlying our civilized society, with its commitment to hierarchy, divisiveness, and control, that mechanically suspects those who are different, the strangers, and systemically creates victors and victims, masters and slaves.
Sandy Krolick graduated Magna cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with a B.A. in the History of Culture from Hobart College in the Finger Lakes Region of New York, a Master's degree from the University of Chicago's Committee on General Studies in Humanities, and a Doctorate in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. After a ten-year career in academia, including appointments at the University of Virginia, the University of Denver-Daniels College of Business, and the Colorado School of Mines, he spent the next twenty years in the partnership and executive ranks of several of America's largest domestic and international firms, including Ernst & Young LLP, General Electric, and Computer Sciences Corporation. Sandy has spent many years traveling around the world, including parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine, and of course North America. Retiring from business at the age of fifty, he recently returned to the USA with his wife Anna, after living and teaching for several years in the central Siberian Steppe, at the foot of the Ural-Altai mountains in Barnaul, Russia. His other published works include Recollective Resolve: A Phenomenological Understanding of Time and Myth (Mercer University Press, 1987), Ethical Decisionmaking Styles (Addison Wesley, 1986), Gandhi in the Postmodern Age: Issues in War and Peace (CSM Press, 1984). He hosts a website at http://www.kulturCritic.com Please visit him there or get his latest book on amazon at: http://www.amazon.com/Recovery-Ecstasy-Notebooks-Siberia/dp/1439227365/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235063064&sr=8-1
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