The American Dream

What happened to the American dream? Where did it go? Our world rating has slipped and fallen through the ages, dropping to where it now stands, to where we are no longer the top dog, to where we are no longer the biggest kid in the playground. What happened? Did we just get tired? Did we just give up? We need to get back to the olden day,s when we worked hard for our futures, where we worked hard for our kids, rather than just saying "Hey, they can make their own way." That is bullshit, we have to push ourselves, push our country to be the best. We have problems, we have recession, we have this, we have that. I can't do it. Stop crying.
Hard work brings about the American dream, hard working people like my Grandparents, like my parents, like my friend Sam Rios, who works hard for a future for his wife, for his daughter, for his step-daughter, while they grow up or go to school. That is the American dream. We do not need to go and help out small, breaking countries like Haiti, so what if there was a natural disaster there, so what if they needed our aid? We need our aid! We did not have the money to give to them, we had money, but not our money, money that was borrowed by a country that is deeply in debt. What happened to helping yourself and your neighbor before you help the next town over, working on your community before you decide to go to another country and help them while your own community is rotting from the inside out behind you? I am not saying that we should not help, only that we should look to our own country before we help others when we cannot even help ourselves.
We dig ourselves deeper into debt every year, we help every one out, where is the help for ourselves? Where are the projects to bring our country back? Where is our New Deal? There are other countries but we outsource, we give ourselves up. Our presidents cannot stop the corporations from outsourcing anymore than they can wave their fingers and magically fix our problems. Do you know who does that? We do, by getting behind our president, by getting behind our congressmen and our representatives and telling them "This is what we want!" Not complaining or pointing fingers and playing the blame game.
We need to get stop being so infatuated with the media, I am not speaking of news, I am talking about how we are fascinated with what happens on the shore of New Jersey, how we cannot wait to watch housewives whine and complain about how their lives are hard, or how we love to watch immature high-schoolers try to raise children even as they try to form their own personalities. What happened to us? We used to work hard, take care of ourselves, take care of our families. Our divorce rates are climbing, poverty is rampant especially among children and we do nothing. We are America. We were great, we helped storm the beaches at Normandy, put a man on the moon, we made great scientific discoveries, brought democracy to the impoverished and oppressed, and now here we are, a nation obsessed with the individual, not ourselves, breaking apart like so much glass, each shard going its own way.
We help every one but ourselves, we wage wars on ideals, not evil, we are failing in almsot everything. We are too concerned with how we could live longer, how we can look prettier, what our telivision and movie stars are doing and not enough with what are politicians are doing. Our politicians are elected by the people to work for the people. How can they work when their boss tells them nothing! How many people do not even vote anymore, how many people know people who do not vote? We are giving up on America and it makes me sad to see it. We are becoming individualistic, sad, apathetic people, more focused on living our own lives than living together. That is our problem, it is not oil, it is not job loss or outsourcing, or any number of other things. It is apathy, the apathy of the American people, and that, that one little word, is the real reason why the American Dream is dying.
We let the American Dream die, we stopped working hard and pushing ourselves, at least the majority of us did. We became apathetic, we started focuising on our lives more and more, on "my" rights, not on our rights. We stopped being a country and divided into individuals. We were great, but we threw it away so that we can complain and whine about how we are poor, or how someone else has more money, or just because we can whine and complain. We are America. It is time we started acting like it.
Work hard, dream big, do not let yourselves be smothered by a dead end job or a mountain of debt. We are, and were, a great country, not because of our accomplishments, but because of the dreams, and the dreamers, who made those accomplishments possible, and that is what we need to do again. It is time to elevate ourselves once more, to fire up the ballast tanks, to pump up our patriotic pride and stride forward, letting the world know that we are here and we are proud, and we will not let ourselves slip into the shadows, We Are America.