The New American Dream is to Leave
Be an American... In this economy?
Many Americans believe that the ‘American Dream’ is dead, it isn’t, it just doesn’t live here anymore. The American Dream has moved. It couldn’t survive the insatiable greed of our country’s elite. Nowadays the ‘American Dream’ takes high speed rail in Romania, enjoys a full year of maternity leave in France, or owns a home in a Chinese high rise; overlooking cities that, from the perspective of aestheticism, could easily exist in the most imaginative of science fiction films.
There’s not much keeping the ‘American Dream’ here. In even our most impressive cities, our patriotic aspirations would be forced to face the dreary-eyed reality of the waking world. You can’t build a home in a place where you have no hope of buying a house. How do you have a child in a world of incessant technological advancement, but unending social decline? How can you justify the debt of college when the skills you learn are on the verge of nullification due to AI automation?
The answer is: You don’t. You leave.
I’m a millennial. We’re the generation that came of age when everything dried up. As the ‘American Dream’ was looking up one-way flights to foreign countries that America was apparently soooo much better than, we simultaneously watched families forced to flee their homes because of foreclosures. We saw small businesses that were once successful pillars in their community crumple up and blow away in the changing economic winds. We witnessed the weaponization of racial, religious, gender, and sexual identity to put a mask on the constant pillaging.
Gen Z came up right as what had dried up when millennials were considered youthful began to catch fire.
Covid came and lockdowns followed. People lost the last remaining remnants of stability they had. Social connections were severed and everyone was forced into their homes for an unforeseen amount of time. This would have been damaging in the best of circumstances, but this is America and the best of circumstances don’t seem to exist here. People lost their jobs, went broke, got stimulus checks that didn’t amount to much while racial tension soared to new heights as George Floyd’s life was snuffed out by a police officer who refused to remove his knee from a suffocating man’s neck.
This would radicalize any population, and it did, but in the wrong direction. While Joe Biden was initially welcomed, he became the figurehead of a failed faux left.
People demanded healthcare reform, student debt reform, affordable housing and toward the end of his tenure, an end to a genocide that we were funding. They were met with a bumbling geriatric who didn’t seem to know where he was.
Not long after Biden was replaced by Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE, the last remaining safety nets were and are still in the process of being cut, federal workers were and still are being fired, foreign prisons are filling up with immigrants both documented and undocumented. With all of this going on, one begins to understands why the ‘American Dream’ found expatriation attractive.
So naturally, we’re left with an option. Leave in an attempt to follow the ‘America Dream’ or stay to quarrel with the nightmare that took its place.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m tired of wrestling with the legislative equivalent of Freddy Krueger.
I’m trying to live, not just survive.