The American Dream is a Nightmare

The American Dream is a nightmare.

The American Dream as it was sold to us, and surely it was sold to us, is a lie and a myth perpetuated to allow an empowered class to experience leisure supported by a disempowered class.

Unlike most other commodities, we don’t pay for the American Dream in dollars, but nothing comes for free. And while this dream does not have a monetary cost, it has a greater cost. It is the cost of our environment. It is the cost of our mental and physical health. It is the cost of our empathy, of community, of solidarity. It is the cost of our safety. It is the cost of our fellow Americans lives. And it is the cost of our imaginations.

Buying into this myth, which is sold to us in advertisements for food and clothes and houses and cars, and is taught to us in school and church and media, is buying into consumption as a path to comfort and success. It is buying into a potential to improve or maintain the conditions of life by competing for artificially scarce resources. It is buying into an economic structure that thrives on waste. An economic system that demands that we each need to acquire the necessities of life and the luxuries of life individually rather than collectively. That teaches us to take care of ourselves and our families whether or not that comes at the expense of someone else.

When we pay The American Dream’s cost to our imagination, we give up our power. We acquiesce to the myth that someone else, someone smarter, or more important than us solved these problems for us, we just need to go along. This is not an incidental, nor an accidental, cost. These systems are ingeniously constructed to suppress our ability to resist. To suppress our ability to imagine different ways, to imagine better systems.

What if we could consider and imagine alternatives? What if?

We need a new dream.

My dream is a society organized around plenty. An America in which we do not struggle to survive, but we participate to thrive. An America in which food, clothing, shelter, transportation, medical care, utilities, all of the necessities of a fulfilled life are provided for collectively. For Free.

An America in which we all work less and provide for each other. A 10 hour work week in which we help create and maintain the goods necessary for life. and then in our non-work life we create what we like, we care for each other, we learn, we teach, we live.

It could be a relatively easy transition. We already produce great surpluses of food, clothing, housing, transportation. The structures could be remade to serve people’s needs rather than to profit the few.

But it won’t be an easy transition, because it means resetting the centers of power from the individual, to the collective. And the people currently in power have built and maintained all of the existing structures to maintain that power for themselves, no matter the cost.

That does not mean it can’t be done, only that we will have a harder time doing it and we will have to do it both inside and outside of the existing system. And this is already happening. Mutual aid and grassroots community cooperative structures are out there. We need more of them.

What is your dream.