The American Dream

April 25, 2010 By Save America

Thousands of immigrants flock to the U.S. every year in pursuit of big dreams. But, the current economic crisis and this administration’s ideologies causes fear that some dreams might not be so attainable……. anymore. Today, the pursuit of this opportunity is a challenge for all future generations of Americans. So, are we to only to face tougher hardship in the U.S.?

Our economy has successfully created opportunity and economic mobility for all American families, but the scale of recent illegal immigration — and especially of poorly educated immigrants — could be cause for future concern. Immigrants from all over the world have come to the United States of America in hope of a better life for themselves and their children. This dream was fueled by the hope of one day leading a happy and prosperous life in a land that allows far more freedom, liberty and opportunities than any other. The American Dream was the idea of an individual overcoming all obstacles and beating all odds to one day be successful in the freest nation. Immigrants from all over the world, at the beginning of the twentieth century, came to America with the hopes of establishing new lives different from the way they lived in Europe and other parts of the world. America was that land where anything was possible. People who lived in poverty, without any way of making their lives better, could come to America and start over. Dreams could come true in America.

So is the American Dream dead or alive? Martin Luther King Jr. said that he too had a dream “that on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood”. Since then, many aspects of Martin Luther King’s dream for the American people have come true, but some still remain a dream.

It has often been said that America is a nation of immigrants, but few people understand how deeply this is true. It is not just that America was settled and built almost entirely by people from somewhere else–from English settlers in the 18th century, to Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants who came at the turn of the 20th century, and from then on every other racial and ethnic group in the world. The deeper reason America is a nation of immigrants is that the motives and goals of immigrants–and the moral outlook they represent–are the essence of the American character. These immigrants believed it was their privilege and duty to work hard and integrate to become a real part of their new community. They took pride in learning English and sought work, some taking two or three different jobs.

America was founded on the idea that all men are endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And how is happiness pursued? By hard work and ambitious effort. To become an American, this is the only creed one has to accept: the political ideal of liberty, the economic ideal of a free market, and the cultural ideal of individualism. Many immigrants today do not have a full, explicit understanding of all of these ideas. But they do know that they are escaping from stagnant and corrupt nations in which little was possible for them. Today, the notion of the ‘American Dream’ have morphed beyond the ideas of political and religious freedom, to a more economically oriented platform. The United States has little by little become a consumer-based society, so the idea of ‘success’ is now measured by the shallowness of material wealth. For some, the American Dream has become all about just having the resources to fulfill their definition of material success, namely, material wealth. We also have an administration that believes in the concept of re-distribution of this wealth from the hands of those hard-working Americans.

The American dream is not about a paternalistic government cradle to grave entitlement programs aimed to redistribute hard working Americans’ earnings; it is about succeeding through your own effort. It’s not about the ‘Nanny State’ always taking care of you, because you don’t know what’s best. The days when you have the freedom to indulge in guilty pleasures without being punished by your government may be coming to an end. Our bodies are gradually becoming socialized. The choices we make about how to live, what to eat and drink and what pleasures we enjoy are increasingly to be guided by the hand of the state. Underlying all of this legislating is the theory that society must collectively dictate individual behavior for the purpose of making society collectively healthier, controlled and equalized. Individuals will must be stamped out and replaced with the will of the state. The American dream is not the cowering vision of a people who believe that they can never make it in the world if they are exposed to the demands of free competition, free enterprise and capitalism. The American dream is the vision of a proud, self-confident people who know they can make it on their own–and who have often welcomed hard-working immigrants from around the world to join them in pursuing success.

This is the real American dream–and we should do whatever we can to protect it. The voters won’t be fooled. The hard-working Americans — blacks, Latinos, women, recent legal immigrants, and just every day working Americans who put these politicians in charge — are paying close attention. Don’t kill it off, don’t close the doors on the aspirations and the ambitions of the millions of families seeking to build a better life for themselves. This is the history of our culture……. the American people deserve no less. If we as Americans, don’t stand up and oppose this dramatic enlargement of the nanny state now, while we have the chance, we will find our choices narrowed year after year until we wake up one day with little control over any decision that the self-appointed experts deem a potential risk — which is more or less everything these days.

We are losing our Republic piece by piece. While our founding fathers realized a stronger government was needed in America, they also feared a government that was too powerful. These men who wrote the Constitution strove to compromise and work together, but above all they maintained a desire to keep government from interfering in the lives of citizens as much as possible. We do not have to go down this path converting America into a social welfare state.

Rep. Paul Ryan points out that 20% of Americans today get 75 percent of their income from the Federal Government, and yet another 20% get 45 percent, while 60% of Americans get more benefits in dollar value from the Federal Government than they pay in taxes. Obama’s budget moves this to 70% of Americans. We’re reaching a tipping point in this country, after which the majority of Americans are more dependent on the government than they are upon themselves.