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Redefining the American dream
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Your own home, your own car, a prosperous career based on a college education - these were the elements of the American Dream. Today, the Great Recession has blogging and talking heads busy rewriting this dream, figuring out what elements stay in and what elements get replaced. It's an industry - the American Dream.
Certainly the college education part is here to stay. Practically everyone has a college education now; there are so many variations on a Bachelor's degree it's hard to know what one means anymore. Knowledge, once a sophisticated, complex system passed on only to those who could sufficiently demonstrate their ability to handle it, is pretty much passed out to everyone now. If any part of this is transformed, it might be the gaining of a second degree as a way for people to reinvent themselves and get ready for The Recovery.
A prosperous career, now, that one's right out the window. Even before we found ourselves with 15.7 million unemployed, more recent graduates were job-surfing rather than career-building. Resumes as long as a user's manual are nothing to be ashamed of anymore; and those who are struggling to get back into the employment world concede they aren't holding out for their "career", but simply trying to put food on the table. Rising wages followed company loyalty out that same window and have splatted right on the sidewalk. No one has yet called an ambulance, those parts of the American Dream were apparently very disposable.
Owning your stuff seemed to be quite important for a long time, until car leases came about, putting people into far more luxurious rides than they could otherwise afford. It seems that ownership, which the Europeans did away with some time ago, is no longer the must-have in America, either. If Wall Street hadn't invented the real estate bubble, home ownership might have even decreased rather than increased in the last ten years, because many entering the workforce didn't get the itch to put down roots so quickly. For this generation, trying new jobs and new cities is more alluring than fixing leaky gutters and mowing lawns. As it is, things might work out to their benefit, for all the baby boomers intoxicated with the smell of their own investments rushed in and bought 2, 3, or 5 homes, and are now probably doomed to be perpetual landlords. If Generations X, Y, and Z can resist the siren call of the banks to become chained to mortgages, they can enjoy a certain freedom from the burden of home ownership, and the percentage of Americans who own their own home might just return back to a normal kind of balance.
So if these capitalistic components of the American Dream are in danger of extinction, what replaces them? The American middle class, fighting for its life, is certainly transforming, shedding the unnecessary and reevaluating its own identity and goals.
We are in the middle of the war, and have some big battles yet to fight. One of the common causes that seems to be uniting many people is the notion of getting off the grid, and this doesn't necessarily apply to electricity.
The electric grid which services our power needs is like a spider's web, in which we are helplessly caught with no alternative at all. The antiquated regulations that govern energy supply go all the way back to the last gilded age, and deserve to be smashed. Energy independence and power generation should be every American's right, and getting off the grid - or perhaps using the grid to produce as well as consume - is becoming the New American Dream for some.
But there are far more grids to get off, and one other grid to consider is the food grid - or web, as ecologists prefer to call it. Homegrowing and localizing food sources is a grass-roots movement that nearly every neighborhood is experimenting with, and this has great implications nationwide. Supplementing that grocery store chain with something harvested 'round the corner, in season, without genetically modified, hormone-induced help, might just be another component of the New American Dream. Suburban agriculture can be done cheaply and efficiently for those who want to get off the web.
And then, there is the -- shh, children, be very quiet, this is very, very secret, don't tell the adults -- the financial grid. Getting off that grid is the scariest and biggest step of all. Barter, scrip, and other concepts that bypass the Wall Street bonus babies entirely...ooh, that one could really redefine the American Dream, for it makes us free. Paying off your consumer debt, not owning a house, bartering for goods and services, growing your own food? This might mean that we Americans would turn away from being voracious, materialistic, object-oriented consumers into producers, who own our own destiny and are truly independent.
In the meantime, a quiet revolution has been taking place in our pockets, as we become infovores. The i-phone, a luxury even a year ago, seems now even in this Great Recession to be the ubiqitous utility. We have finally placed nearly all the world's knowledge, and nearly all the world's conversations, at our fingertips anytime anywhere. Americans have become voracious info-raptors, requring massive digital gigabytes of datameat, while other cultures go without.
An off-the grid ethic, your own iphone, and a steadyish string of jobs may just be the New American Dream. When the spokesmen for The Recovery are finished talking, keep listening carefully to the other sounds in the wilderness, and you may just hear the New American Dream being born.
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