Bye Bye, American Dream?

The Protestant ethic that this country was founded upon said that if you worked hard, you could pursue your dreams and succeed, but now more than ever, that work is not paying off. About half of this country’s population finds that their standard of living has not improved within the last five years. There is a sense that we are at a standstill, or worse, in the midst of a serious decline that the next generation will inherit.

There is a lot of talk of the middle class being “squeezed out,” with a small percentage of obscenely wealthy folks taking over half of the nation’s total income. While there was always the belief that we could only move upwards, now the typical middle-class citizen is losing his job to technology or to a cheaper labor force abroad.

Maybe the gluttonous days of owning gigantic homes and over-sized, gas-guzzling cars are over, but is that necessarily a bad thing? As most of us struggle to some degree in this difficult economic time, a positive result is that we are forced to think about what really matters, and what is just superficial materialism. What is the American Dream? What is your American Dream? [USA Today]