The European Dream (6 page)

Gambling has fast become the national pastime and, for many Americans, a near obsession. Powerball jackpots can exceed $300 million. It’s not unusual for people to wait in lines that are sometimes five hundred people deep, spending most of their day queued up to purchase a single ticket.
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More than $400 million a year is given over to advertising state lottos and other games.
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Much of the advertising is spent on exploiting the American Dream theme of rags to riches. The New York Lottery lures customers with the slogan “A Buck and a Dream.” The Chicago Lottery exclaims, “This could be your ticket out.”
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Gambling, like drugs, has become a dangerous addiction for millions of Americans. Both cater to the need for instant gratification—happiness now. The National Research Council (NRC) estimates that upwards of 3 million Americans are “lifetime” pathological gamblers, an additional 1.8 million Americans are “past year” pathological gamblers, 7.8 million people are “lifetime” problem gamblers, and 4 million are “past year” problem gamblers.
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More troubling is the rising number of adolescent gamblers who fall in the “past year” pathological or problem category—approximately 20 percent of American youth.
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The desire for instant success has become pervasive across American culture. Legal gambling is only one of the many venues Americans increasingly pursue in hopes of realizing the American Dream. For a while, in the late 1990s, the stock market was all the rage. Millions of Americans gambled away their life savings in hopes of becoming instant millionaires. High-tech stocks became the new ticket to success. The smart investor became the new Horatio Alger protagonist—except, unlike the original American hero who had to work hard and overcome adversity to succeed, his modern sequels merely had to listen to tips on the street, pick would-be winners, and place a call to their brokers. In the end, the market came tumbling down, leaving millions of baby boomers and Gen Xers without adequate savings for their retirement years and having to face the prospect of working well into their seventies to make ends meet.

For many younger Americans, the new genre of TV reality shows has become the latest vehicle to hitch their star to. Thousands of young people line up to audition for shows like
All American Girl, American Idol, American Juniors, America’s Next Top Model, Average Joe, The Apprentice, The Bachelor
and
Bachelorette, Big Brother, Meet My Folks, Mr. Personality, Next Action Star, Fame, The Family, Joe Millionaire, Star Chamber, Survivor, 30 Seconds to Fame,
and
Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?
In 2004, there were more than 170 reality shows on American television.
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All of the participants in these shows hope to be discovered, to become famous, to be a celebrity. While some of the shows require a certain amount of talent and expertise, most just require the participants to show up and be themselves. Andy Warhol’s prescient prediction, more than thirty years ago, that in America everyone would have their fifteen minutes of fame, is now being played out nightly on American TV, as ordinary people put themselves in front of the cameras so that millions of other Americans can watch them live out their lives.

For the lucky few who make it on to these reality shows, fame is indeed short-lived. Most quickly shrink back into the anonymity of day-to-day life after their appearance on the shows. But, for millions of American viewers, seeing someone just like themselves on TV becoming famous, even for an instant, keeps alive the idea that it could happen to them as well . . . all it takes is a little luck. In the meantime, millions of viewers can live out the American Dream vicariously by watching the fortunate few who beat the odds, convinced that the dream is still alive and that their turn is coming.

Many social critics would argue that what millions of Americans are really embracing is not the American Dream so much as the American daydream. The authentic American Dream combines faith in God with the belief in hard work and sacrifice for the future. The new substitutes—legal gambling, celebrity television shows, and the like—are grounded in fantasy and delusion. We have become, say the critics, a people who have grown fat, lazy, and sedentary, who spend much of our time wishing for success but are unwilling to “pay our dues” with the kind of personal commitment required to make something out of our lives.

This is a harsh judgment, but probably increasingly true for a number of young middle-class Americans who grew up coddled and spoiled by doting parents who showered them with every conceivable pleasure and experience money could buy, often before they were even old enough to appreciate it. Overindulged, these sons and daughters of baby-boomer parents are unlikely candidates for the kind of personal commitment required to keep the authentic American Dream alive. Faith, discipline, hard work, self-reliance, and self-sacrifice are hardly the terms one would normally use to describe today’s American middle-class youngsters. Ennui is a more accurate description of the emotional and mental state of growing numbers of American young people. “Been there, done that” is a phrase one often hears from kids. By the time these youngsters have reached early adulthood, they have been everywhere, done everything, seen everything, and had everything. They have little or nothing to look forward to or to aspire to. Their dreams have been answered even before they had a chance to dream them. For these young Americans, the most difficult life task is motivation itself. It’s no wonder that alcohol, drugs, and gambling are all on the rise. When the future is no longer something to work toward and fill in but is something already experienced and left behind, then only momentary pleasures are left to ward off the boredom and make it through another day.

Some observers of the American scene have argued that one of the reasons that the American Dream is losing currency is that we have over-empowered our kids, giving them an inflated sense of ego and, with it, a belief that they are entitled to success because of their many special attributes. One educator once put it this way: “Today kids get an A just for showing up.” I was recently teaching a class of young business leaders, half of whom were from Europe, the other half from America. The Europeans said they were perplexed that whenever they attended a business meeting where a presentation was given by an American businessperson, the Americans in attendance would shower the speaker with congratulations for doing a brilliant job even if he or she was merely delivering a rather standard talk about not very interesting things. The Europeans complained that because Americans are constantly over-empowering one another, the bar for performance continues to be lowered and standards of excellence compromised. After all, if you are always being told that everything you do is insightful, well conceived and thought out, and effectively executed, then why try harder?

A sense of entitlement goes hand in hand with over-empowerment. If one is continually told how great he or she is, he or she eventually begins to believe it and comes to expect that all good things should come to him or her. For these young people, the American Dream is no longer thought of as a quest but is regarded more as a right.

The desire for instant gratification, when combined with a sense of over-empowerment and entitlement, can create a volatile emotional mix. The narcissistic personality type is generally less able to handle life’s many frustrations, and more prone to antisocial behavior, even including using violence to get what they feel they deserve and are entitled to.

Is the once noble quest of the American Dream turning dark and foreboding at the hands of a new generation? A tracking poll of the views and values of Canadian and U.S. citizens over an eight-year period from 1992 to 2000 offers some insight into the matter. Canadians and Americans were asked to “agree or disagree” that when one is extremely tense or frustrated, a little violence can offer relief, and that “it’s no big deal.” In 1992, 14 percent of Americans and Canadians agreed that a little violence is okay.
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By 1996, the proportion of Canadians believing that a little violence was justified had fallen to 10 percent, while the proportion of Americans had leaped to 27 percent.
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In 2000, the proportion of Canadians went back up slightly to 14 percent, but the Americans who thought a little violence was okay shot up to 31 percent, nearly one-third of the American public.
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Even more disquieting, Canadians and Americans were asked if “it is acceptable to use violence to get what you want.” In 1992, 9 percent of Canadians and only 10 percent of Americans said using violence to get what you want was acceptable.
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By 1996, however, 18 percent of Americans felt that it was all right to use violence to get what you want, while still only 9 percent of Canadians thought the same way.
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In 2000, the gap between Canadians and Americans had widened even more. Twelve percent of Canadians thought violence was justified to get what they wanted, while 24 percent of Americans felt the same way.
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That’s nearly one out of four Americans believing that using violence to get what they want is acceptable. Michael Adams, who heads up the polling organization Environics, concluded that “Americans are prepared to put a lot more on the line than Canadians to achieve their version of the American Dream,” including committing acts of violence, if necessary.
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Wait a minute! Can it really be that bad? True, Americans are more focused on becoming rich than any other people. And yes, we are probably more self-involved and overindulged than many other people in the world. But what about the other side of the American character, the civic side that the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville found so appealing about the young America when he visited the country in 1831? Tocqueville took notice of the American penchant to create voluntary associations to advance civic welfare, a phenomenon largely absent in Europe at the time. He wrote,

While Americans are far and away the most individualistic people in the world, we also give an enormous amount of our time to serving the communities in which we dwell. Fraternal organizations, youth clubs, neighborhood and civic associations, arts and educational groups, sports and recreational activities, and numerous other efforts of a like kind have long been a staple of American life. We have always prided ourselves on being a nation of civic-minded volunteers. Could we be both self-centered and community-minded at the same time?

Although seemingly paradoxical, the American proclivity to civic-mindedness has come to reflect our deeply held notions about individual freedom. Americans have always had misgivings about ceding too much power to the state. For us, freedom has meant the ability to amass personal wealth and become independent. We have long viewed the government’s role as a guarantor of individual property rights and have eschewed the notion that it ought to play an activist role in helping to provide for the general welfare or redistribute wealth to the less fortunate among us. (More on this in chapter 2.) So, from the very beginning, Americans preferred to keep taxes low and limit government involvement in the community in order to optimize individual accumulation of wealth and ensure greater personal control over the disposition of one’s property. Helping the needy, in turn, became a matter of individual choice.

Lester Salamon, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, notes that America’s unique civil society tradition grew out of our history of individualism. He points out that “a strongly individualistic cultural ethos . . . has produced deep-seated antagonism to concentrated power.” The result is that Americans are “reluctant to rely too heavily on government to cope with social and economic problems, thus leaving such significant problems to be tackled through private voluntary effort.”
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That’s why, for example, in America, unlike Europe, half of all U.S. colleges and hospitals, and two-thirds of the social service organizations, are in the not-for-profit sector rather than the public sector.
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America’s strong religious roots also account for the proliferation of civil society institutions. Many of the nation’s nonprofit health, education, and social service institutions were created as extensions of religious institutions. For example, Americans opted, early on, to establish hospitals in the not-for-profit sector, rather than rely on government to provide health care for the citizenry. Today, 46 percent of the employment in the not-for-profit sector resides in the health-care arena.
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Anxious to ensure against a single official state religion, as was the case throughout most of Europe, Americans made the decision to separate church and state, allowing diverse religious sects to flourish. They did and, among other things, created their own colleges and universities to provide religious instruction along with a general education.

When we peel off all the many layers of the American not-for-profit sector, what becomes obvious is the looming presence of the religious community in the civil society as compared to European nations. American religious organizations make up 11 percent of the nonprofit employment and nearly one-third of all the volunteering, whereas in Western Europe, religious employment is only 3.5 percent of all nonprofit paid employment, and religious volunteering is only 11 percent of all volunteer work.
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