Growing Up

[bertine]

Stuff is going on in my life that I haven't written about. I'll get around to it but until I do, I have a couple questions to ask you:

What do you want to with your life? What are you doing to get to make that happen?

Comments

Re: Are they low aspirations, or knowing what matters to you?

[gwangi.livejournal.com]

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not the American Dream, they're our basic rights. Add in the right to own property (the Virginian Declaration of Rights, which was kind of a first continental congress precursor to the Declaration of Independence says...

That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.)

and you have the things that are so basic to our freedoms that government must address any reductions in them specifically. George III failed to do that (along with all the other things listed further on in the Declaration), which is why we told him to bugger off. But those things aren't a very direct statement of what we're talking about.

The American Dream, I think most people would agree, is that you can raise your social class through hard work, without interference from other social classes or the government. If you're an uneducated Slovakian Jew who moves here speaking not a word of English, it's possible for you to eventually become Chief of Police, or a millionaire, or a baseball star, or whatever. In much of the rest of the world, that's still not going to happen, and back in the early parts of the 1900s, that "much" should have read "basically all". That's why immigrants come here!

Re: Are they low aspirations, or knowing what matters to you?

[bertine.livejournal.com]

Exactly, which is why I don't think I would descriped "2.5 kids, 1.8 pets, a spouse..." as "The American Dream but rather as "The American Lifestyle" and not really one that anyone has.

It is sort of like the myth of the 50s nuclear family. Very few people had it.