Issue # 1405      1 April 2009

Culture and Life

Illusion stripped from the American Dream

Rob Gowland

Most Americans used to believe that the majority of people in other countries spent their time casting envious eyes on the lifestyle of the USA. This was an image fostered by US leaders, Hollywood and right-wing politicians alike.

It was always a highly suspect position, with many exceptions and qualifications even among its proponents. Nevertheless, there was general agreement among most people that the US was the richest country in the world and, hence, must presumably enjoy the highest standard of living.

Today, in the wake of the financial crisis, a huge number of US citizens actually enjoy (“endure” might be a better word) a lower standard of living than many so-called Third World countries. In fact, to many Americans, bragging about the USA’s wealth is now a sick joke.

The “American Dream”, which has been constantly paraded before the world by the US film and television industries, has for many Americans become a nightmare. Consider this truly catastrophic figure: over the last six months alone, 3.3 million jobs have been lost in the US.

The number of homeless children in the United States today is 1.5 million. Millions more Americans think themselves fortunate if they can call a trailer park, or a rat-infested inner-city tenement, “home”. For many others, homelessness is a grim reality.

On March 26, 2009, Reuters reported that “emergency shelters brimming with homeless people in California’s capital [Sacramento] are quietly turning away more than 200 women and children a night in a sign of the deteriorating US economy.

“And their ranks appear to be growing as rising joblessness and mortgage foreclosures take their toll in Sacramento and other US cities, experts say.”

But it would be wrong to blame US homelessness solely on the present crisis. US President Barack Obama himself has recognized that “the homeless problem was bad even when the economy was good”.

In his weekly televised address Obama stated the obvious: “It is not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.” As always, the crucial point is not how much wealth there is in the US but how it is (or is not) distributed.

Meanwhile, “tent cities” of homeless people are springing up across the “land of the free”. The one in Sacramento shelters up to 200 homeless people under canvass.

According to Reuters, “homeless advocates say they expect such encampments to spread as the housing crisis worsens and shelters fill up.”

Michael Stoops, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, told the news agency: “I expect a tremendous increase in homelessness over the next couple of years.”

The latest US national figures, in a January report by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, showed that as of 2007, “42 percent of homeless people in the United States, and 70 percent of those in California, slept on the streets, in cars, tents or abandoned buildings.”

Reuters noted that “the ‘Skid Row’ area of Los Angeles is thought to have the nation’s highest concentration of homeless, with more than 5,000 counted in that 50-block area in 2007.

According to Reuters, US experts say “it typically takes six to eight months to go from losing one’s home to turning up at a shelter doorstep.” But already the numbers queuing at shelters are growing.

Those of you who, like me, have been to see the highly enjoyable fantasy romance Twilight will have seen the depiction of Phoenix, Arizona, as the epitome of the middleclass American dream. However, in the real world, “I’ve never seen it like this before”, Darlene Newsom, head of the UMOM Day Centers emergency housing project in Phoenix, told Reuters, “and I have 30 years of experience working with the homeless”.

The number of homeless families in Phoenix seeking services has doubled in the past three months.

Similarly, in Sacramento, Loaves & Fishes, a charity that supports the homeless, now provides a free lunch to about 650 people a day, up about 10 percent from a year ago, but private donations to the organisation have been flat.

“We are struggling to keep our doors open,” director Joan Burke told Reuters, who also reported that “nearby St John’s Shelter, which caters to women and children, has been running at or near capacity for months – filling roughly 100 beds a night – with a waiting list well over twice that long.”

“This is up from the daily average of 80 women and children turned away in 2008”, case manager Kellie Dockendorf said. “And getting in can take up to 45 days.

“The mix of clientele is changing too”, she said. “We’re getting a lot more working people. We’re getting more people with an education. We’re getting a lot more people who are working part-time or not getting enough hours to pay their bills,” she said.

With homelessness growing, healthcare non-existent (being prohibitively expensive) for large numbers of its people, child mortality rates at Third World standards, appalling education standards (a majority of high-school students being unable even to locate England on a map), its cities rocked by crime and violence and with private prisons its major growth industry, the US today seems anything but a country to be envied, don’t you think?

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