The American Lucid Nightmare

The American dream is just that; it’s a dream and not real.

Courtesy: totheroots.files.wordpress.com

(CALGARY, Alberta) - A lucid dream is a dream where you wake up in it and you know you are dreaming. One particular feature of the lucid dream is that you can control what happens in the dream.

The New York Times ran an article Oct 18 by Peter S. Goodman, “Foreclosures Force Ex-Homeowners to Turn to Shelters” telling the story of Sheri West in Cleveland. Ms. West, in her mid-fifties is divorced, the mother of three grown adults, grandmother to six and great-grandmother to one.

She and her husband were working and making a combined $19/hour in 2001. With a modest inheritance they were able to put a down payment on a middle-class house and, when another came up for sale on the same block, she was able to buy it and converted it to a residence for homeless people where she looked after five people and was paid by the agencies who had placed them.

Divorce in 2003 and by 2005 she was broke. She lived where she could over the next few years (including her car) and last month took up a room in the West Side Catholic Center. Her 90 day limit runs out in December.

Goodman writes that “in the Midwest, foreclosure played a role for 15 percent of newly homeless people, according to the survey, reflecting soaring rates of unemployment—Ohio’s reached 10.8 percent in August—and aggressive lending to people with damaged credit.”

One commenter from Tennessee wrote:

“Initially, I felt for Ms West but...This was self inflicted and this story repeats itself over and over. Folks living above their means buying status symbols and playing tricky financial games. Why have people bought into this concept?”

I’ve quoted him before, but here again is economist E. H. Chamberlin writing in 1932 where he called advertising

“selling methods which play upon the buyer’s susceptibilities, which use against him laws of psychology with which he is unfamiliar and therefore against which he cannot defend himself, which frighten or flatter or disarm him—all of these have nothing to do with his knowledge. They are not informative; they are manipulative. They create a new scheme of wants by rearranging his motives.”

To the Tennessee commenter: That’s why people buy into these various anti-social concepts which goes beyond advertising to cover almost every action that a person undertakes. People have been duped into believing all sorts of fantasies.

One commenter from New Jersey wrote:

"Get a job!" shriek some posters. "Didn't she know what she was getting into?" say others. "She has three grown children," notes another. Yes, she must share the blame for her plight ... BUT the failings are also society's:

“*The destruction of the extended family and neighbourhood community (you can thank the "conservatives" for that one, since capitalism demands high mobility of labour, which, combined with the excessive valorisation of the "nuclear family," pretty well dismantled the secular social safety net);

“*The deterioration of the public school system, which does not teach financial literacy, citizenship, and similar basic survival skills;

“*the dismantling of America's productive base, starting with unskilled trades, moving on to skilled manufacturing jobs, and service work such as call centres, then information services, white-collar back-office jobs, and finally skilled professionals, until we are well on the way to becoming a handful of superrich and a nation of millions of maids, chauffeurs, poolkeepers and scrubwomen.”

Goodman quotes Ms. West at the very end of the article: “I do want to eventually own a house again,” she said. “That’s the American dream. That’s what everybody wants.”

Her dream turned into a lucid nightmare; she woke up in it and is now living it. But, unlike a real lucid dream she essentially has no control over what happens in her nightmare.

When I checked this story on Monday morning, there were over 120 comments and a large number of them were not really sympathetic to her plight. What few, if any of the commenters, seems to understand is that this can happen to anyone. You can be wealthy and own several revenue properties but, when the property values go underwater, you can go from paper millionaire to destitute in a day.

And money? It almost doesn’t matter how much you have. There were people who had millions but, after being processed by Bernie Madoff, some now are on the edge of homelessness themselves.

Don’t kid yourself. It can happen to you in the blink of an eye and it’s not fundamentally your fault and you have no control over it. The American dream is just that; it’s a dream and not real.

People have bought into two dreams—the first that they can have it all; the second that a society of “every man for himself” will give that to them. It’s not that people are stupid (most aren’t) but they are Barnum’s people: “there’s a sucker born every minute”—America needs to stop bearing them. And those already alive need to really wake up.!

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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which explains why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary.

He has been writing exclusively for Salem-News.com since March 2009 and continues to work on a creative non-fiction book which he began in 1998. You can write to Daniel at: Salem-News@gravityshadow.com