Rick Raw: Deflation of the American Dream–Lowered Expectations of The New Reality

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

Countdown to the New Reality!

The 1950s-1960s button-down American Dream focused on conformity. Bright young men were expected to attend college and became professionals. They wore Brooks Brothers suits and ties to work. They got married, bought a suburban home, and had a couple of kids a la The Donna Reed Show. To quell the monotony, they drank copious amounts of whiskey and had affairs with their secretaries.

The early American Dream was a narrow minded and rigid philosophy with no room for creativity or eccentricity. Many people who bought into this limited interval became bored and unhappy. Suburbia turned into a prison, trapping many people into living lives they loathed.
In the early 1960s, the birth control pill hit the market and launched the Sexual Revolution.

Disillusioned housewives divorced their uptight husbands and joined swingers clubs. The pervasive use of marijuana and the birth of now classic rock’n’roll in the youth subculture inspired the Counter Culture Revolution. "Hippies" became a derogatory moniker for the establishment "squares" to mock the leftist views.

The term "alternative lifestyles" became part of the lexicon. Psychedelic drugs’ high priest, Timothy Leary, extolling the altered states of marijuana use, said, "Turn on, tune in, and drop out." It was a idealistic end-game.

Ah yes, the Big Dream was still a significant ideal, but it had been expanded with more flexibility. Women were getting jobs and having fewer kids, equalizing the household power base. Feminist literature became popular.

The 1990s brought us unprecedented prosperity during the Clinton years. The new Modified Dream was still relevant because of boundless available loans. Credit cards offered ridiculous limits compared to the holder’s income.

Unscrupulous mortgage companies and banks were writing mortgage loans for houses worth $750 grand and the buyer only earned $40 grand a year. A body with a pulse was the only requirement to get a mortgage.

It was the 1990s-early 2000s bubble that encouraged everyone to live far beyond their means. It was the pentacle of the Big Dream that rose from the suburban mind-set of the 1960s. Party like it was 1999 baby!

The dream turned into a nightmare in 2008, when the loan sharks converted the mortgages into bonds to trade on Wall Street. Soon, this paper was worthless as the housing market tanked. The housing bubble burst, and the paper lion crumbled. Suddenly, banks were going under and millions of people couldn’t pay their mortgages.

Foreclosures were rampant and spreading like the plague. What’s worse, the swindlers were being exposed as their Ponzi schemes collapsed. The Big Dream fragmented into the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.

This deflation of the American Dream is a permanent readjustment of our expectations. Our whole philosophy of prosperity is changing into the New Reality of reduced wages, massive layoffs, outsourced jobs, dwindling American resources.

We face a New Dream of lower standards of living. In some ways, it’s like we have been blasted back in time to the 1950s.We must learn to live within our means. If we can’t afford something, then we can’t buy it. We must save more money and spend less. This is the bold new economics of today’s America. We must look for new green jobs or start imaginative new businesses that deal with the New Reality of green energy.

More importantly, we must close our borders to the onslaught of illegal aliens flooding into the United States and lowering our wage scales and taking all the construction jobs.
Our lawmakers need to pass legislation that forbids corporations from building plants in other countries like Mexico or outsourcing customer service jobs to India. Finally, we need to start building things in America instead of China.

Still, it will take years to pull out of this recession. But the recovery will bring us up to the New

Reality of a more modest dream for the middle class, without overextended credit and tightened mortgage loan qualifications. The credit driven prosperity of the 1990s and early 2000s will never happen again. When the dust clears, we will have more savings and ultimately a brighter future once the economy stabilizes.