living

What is the American dream today? If you ask most people, they will answer something about a good career, a better home, or success in all things. What most of them really mean can be said much simpler and without pretense. The American dream is more money, but it didn’t used to be.

Money didn’t used to be the American dream, but it has become the facsimile of it. This is because our country has lost itself and few remember what we once believed in.

The truth is the American dream used to be happiness, now it is money. Even those who dream of fame or power, don’t really care about either without having money to back it up. This is all true, because American is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

America isn’t the greatest country today.

This is an assertion that is made regularly by the more progressive politically active person today. This is an opinion held by both liberal and conservative persons, by men and women, even an opinion by those that are anti-government radicals and anarchists. Most hold this opinion because something has left them disillusioned with the way American treats people, enforces laws, engages in foreign policy, or the way it fails to do each of these things. In any case, the American dream has slowly been eroded in the wake of the shifting of society into socially separate and economically stratified groups that feel their separation from true power to change the United States of America. That America is not the greatest country in the world and it isn’t nearly as rich, as it once was either.

American has become a divided nation.

The real problem with the American dream today is essentially that most intelligent people are guided in how they are focused on achieving it. We have a two party system that is supposed to be representative of equality and real world representation of public opinion. In reality, the two party system is set up in such a way, that if we do not choose one of the two sides, it is nearly impossible to even have an opinion. Anything that mildly deviates from the left or the right, those views are not likely to get enough support to be represented. Ask anyone from an extremist point of view, or someone holding very middle of the road political opinions. Both these equally valid positions, simply do not have enough representatives in the population to warrant either party worry about them. Except possibly in little percentages or swing votes, and only during the elections of major importance like the presidential, or elections for the Senate and House.

Americans think great things about the United States, but they have no reason or proof that they should feel that way about America. Almost as if there were two countries simultaneously existing on top of one another.

One being America, a land whose population is made up of common people and citizens, but nobody who actually can count on the government to protect them, or even share the same country with them. The other being the United States, it is a country whose population is made up of true believers in the body political or you might call them the United Statesians, like the Romans were the true believers in the military government overlooking the Roman Empire. Americans are free but not equal to the United Statesians. Both sides of American want freedom, but both do not believe in the same way of achieving it.

One thing is true, despite these basic conflicts.

Most Americans wane nostalgic for the past. A time before television, before technology, before the Internet, and before the country had become so jaded. When the country wasn’t so scared to be politically correct or socially incorrect. If the American dream still exits, it is a dream that is rooted in somehow returning to a place of innocence. Because happiness is still the real American dream in our hearts.

Jessica Kane is a professional blogger who writes for Faxage a leading company that provides Internet fax service for individuals and businesses.