Is the American Dream Over?

[Mandy Muffin]

I recent read an article that reduced the American dream to six elements: owning a home, owning a car, providing education for your children, having health care insurance, going on a vacation at least once a year and providing for your retirement. I don't quibble with these goals but I do get concerned that that dream may be changing.

Here is my assessment on the reality and desirability of these six elements:

--Who wants a home if the value is below the pay off amount on the mortgage or what you originally paid for it?  I own one such home.

--Who wants a car when the price of gas, insurance and other expenses of running a car have skyrocketed and the future costs are uncertain?  My last car was a Toyota Corola (35 mpg), a far cry from the Buick Electra station wagon that I once used for family travel. 

--Who can afford a modern day college education with $40,000 a year a typical cost of sending a child to a moderately priced school?  I worked my way through a top rated 4 year private college from 1957-61. You couldn't do that today.

--Who can afford the American system of health medicine, which runs about double what most other industrial nations pay for the same services?  And for this amount of money the quality of outcome ranks well below the top ten. I am for Universal Care but if we provide 50 million people with free health care there is going to be a cost shift. 

--Who is going on vacations, when the economy stinks and the value of what you own is going down as the cost of everything you purchase is going up?  Going on an annual vacation for the modern family is often cost prohibitive. 

--Who is going to retire when baby boomers are looking at companies that have reduced or eliminated pensions, the economy is poor and the government tells us that Social Security and Medicare are going broke?   I once did a calculation that if everybody was forced to retire at 65, America would have full employment. Who can afford to retire today?  I took early retirement at age 58. 

Maybe somebody needs to go out and take another survey on the American dream and get some new standards of success. Got any ideas?

[Rain]

Yes it is, The dream as we knew it, now we have to a different dream.

[Mandy Muffin]

I love it.  As I indicated, I have spent some time in China, including Shanghai, the Paris of the East.  It is a beautiful, modern city, with a vital energy.  When I was there the housing was going private enterprise from public ownership.  The Chinese were elated to be able to purchase condos that were theirs.  The economy is planned and the dream is allowed to happen on a schedule.  Here we let people purchase houses they couldn't afford and the result almost took down our economy. 

[MGDJ]

There are those who say another great depression is the only thing that is going to get America back on track.  Responsibility of the individual has been an issue with the current state of affairs.  Personal debt is rising.  Social structure is breaking down.  The divorce rate is over 50% in America. 

Awareness of our shortcomings is a problem.  Through social media, we are privvy to the successes of others and that affects our demeanor.  Marketing has become a science and is permeating every aspect of our lives.  You need a college education, you need a bigger house, and you need to take an expensive vacation!

Comparatively speaking, each one of us (even those that think their dreams are dead) is living an American dream everyday when we wake up in a world without violence, full of opportunities, and without major restrictions of how we associate with one another. 

[Mandy Muffin]

I appreciate the inputs, as there is truth in both comments.

I have been lucky enough to travel to many countries and study culture.  I was especially interested in finding out how people lived and what they wanted out of life.  One Chinese college coed told me  "We want a chicken in every pot, but in China sometimes it is a communal pot."  Although China has a strong economic society, some needs of the Chinese, like housing, free education/day care, medicine, etc are provided by the government.  They have a sense of family, as 92% of them come from the same Han Chinese family.   America will be more resistant to giving up individualism but it may be coming. 

[Chandrashekhar Vairale(Samidha)]

Unfortunately it is Won people,Won country,The  bigheartedness and magnanimity is missing .. Materialistic living brings downs the real riches 'Nature' has to offer ...We sit in judgement and forget to live our own lives..The Sandy experience shows how man has made himself slave to his own creations...well each to his/her own thoughts! Peace on earth and goodwill to all!

[exedir]

For many Americans the new paradigm is survival.  And not that of our ancestors, the survival of the ways our parents lived in the halcyon decade of the fifties which generated the American Dream both as an aspiration and as a reality.  What had happen was that dream's reality became the new floor of what was to be expected for the following generations, and we are three generations down from those days and that time.  

So, what's the new normal, is less what has to be expected?  And less of what?  And has the implied social compact been broken as to what America and Americans are and will be in the future. 

First, things change, nothing is static and not all things under control as to time and circumstances.  Second, even as things change and challenges arise, we are still as America and Americans in the best of positions to create and recreate the American Dream, a new one.

The first part of that dream is as it has always been, opportunity.  Many understand that opportunity exists but not everyone has the capacity, desire and the stamina to use opportunity but opportunity also means risk.  Second part of the dream is that wealth is not just things, it is the ability to have the freedom to be, to be something of one's own creation.  Unfortunately just being is not being creative and challenged, being can be just waking, eating and doing things to fill time, like, make an income and otherwise move through life as comfortably as possible, on or offline.

Part of the future dream is more complicated because we are more complicated.  Once the social compact was more a matter of recognizing that we had more in common, living in smaller spaces, shared experiences of war and sacrifice, thought similar thoughts on god and country, understood that there were limits, limits on what to do and what to think.  

We once lived the idea E pluribus unum,  from many one.  Now it is from many, many; many points of view, ways of living and acting as individuals and as members of society.  And all of this makes it harder to reach, reach a common goal and diminishes the need to live as one, one people in one country.

[Mandy Muffin]

This is the point I was trying to make.  Maybe the paradigm has shifted.  My ancestor left a life of serfdom in France to come to North America where he was given seven years of servitude, a few acres of land and the right to farm it.  Millions came for just a job or the same opportunity to seek land.  Some came involuntarily.  Today's citizen expects more from the state but life is more complex.  We replaced a log cabin with five bedroom colonial in the suburbs, a horse with a car, the country doctor with the modern medical clinic, a country school teacher with a $200,000 university degree, and the kids taking care of the old folks with a Florida retirement community, etc. 

What will the new paradigm be?

[Chandrashekhar Vairale(Samidha)]

Isn't all this due to the addiction to a particular way of life ? I feel as you age your requirements get lesser and mobility gets restricted... I am not saying about survival but  'Way of living' should be economic and rational..