I love America. It is a country full of energy, optimism, goodness. However it is also a place full of contradictions.
On the one hand, there is this the national belief that this is the best country in the world. America shall always overcome. Almost naive by its simplicity, yet at times energizing when you see the country united after September 11, or the USA giving the rest of the world a lesson in tolerance and democracy by electing and celebrating President Obama. This is the richest, best democracy in the world, with the best schools, hospitals, and just very good people.
On the flipside, this is also a country of striking inequalities and paradoxes. A country where the middle class is getting smaller, where health-care and education have increasingly become a privilege, where religion is omnipresent, where elections can be bought, where criticizing the policies is being unpatriotic etc.
Those contradictions present us with a much gloomier picture of the United States, exacerbated by the recent economic conditions, which resonate so much with the meaning of the American Dream per se. What’s at stake with this crisis is not only the survival of a system -although this is the most pressing matter -but also the core of the American identity; as citizens / consumers realize that the US model has actually not been functioning as well as they thought, they could become hangover, from too much of, too fast a reality influx.
Assuming that we do recover from the recession, the question is then what will be the long-term effect of this reality-check to Americans? Will they sober-up and become “skeptic-realists” for all things American, hardened by 12-18 months of though economic times, or will they revert back to the euphoria that was the American mindset no less than 24 months ago, regardless of the country’s remaining shortcomings by then?
America must never lose its -almost infantile- optimism. That’s what makes this country so great. Still, moving forward, it will also need a dose of realism and self-awareness to conquer greatness again and take the dream to the next level. Maturing while preserving naiveté…
This is a pretty tough balance to achieve, yet doable as we already have one live example in President Obama; he can either break the bad news to citizens -appealing to their “adult” side- or energize them through a hopeful “we shall overcome” speech as we recently saw.
From that standpoint, President Obama is not only guiding the destiny of this country, he may also very well be defining the contours of what the 21st Century American should be: an Optimist Realist .
Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | 21st century america, American Dream, Economy, Obama
