'The American Dream Has Turned into a Nightmare'

It’s been said that those who are looking for a honest opinion of themselves need to go outside their immediate circle of family and friends to get the straight scoop.

In other words, if you really want to know what others see and the impression you make when you interact with them, then it probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to ask those who might find it hard to stop their relationship with you from influencing their judgment.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that you can only trust outsiders to tell it like it is, because they might have other reasons for shading the truth, or worse, they might have a poor sense of judgment.

Still, experience suggests outsiders’ take on many things can add a layer of understanding that is hard to get from one’s inner circle alone. With that in mind, the following report from Germany’s Spiegel Online, “Recession Shadows America’s Middle Class,” paints a portrait of today’s America that many Americans might find particularly disconcerting.

American society is breaking apart. Millions of people have lost their jobs and fallen into poverty. Among them, for the first time, are many middle-class families. Meet Pam Brown from New York, whose life changed overnight.

The crisis caught her unprepared. “It was horrible,” Pam Brown remembers. “Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed.”

Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That’s all she orders — it’s too late for breakfast and too early for lunch.

She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she’s long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx. It’s only luck that she’s not homeless outright.

“One thing came after another — boom, boom, boom,” Brown recalls. “I kept getting up and dusting myself off, but I could never get ahead again. I spiraled further and further into the abyss.” Her voice is trembling now. “I’ve done everything America told me to do. I went to school. I’ve never been to jail. I’ve kept my nose clean. My kids are great kids.”

She laughs a sarcastic laugh. “And now?”

Wall Street Up, Incomes Down

Pam Brown is one of millions of Americans who, during the recession, tumbled from their idyllic middle-class existence to near-poverty — or beyond. For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend. Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them.

Wall Street is preoccupied with chasing new profits again. Yet for large sections of the nation, that old myth of working your way up, of bootstrap success and its ultimate prize, homeownership, has evaporated. The middle class, the America’s backbone, is crumbling. The American Dream has turned into a nightmare.

Last year the US poverty rate reached 14.3 percent, 1.1 percent higher than in 2008. Almost five million Americans skidded below the poverty line ($22,050 annual income for a family of four), many from hitherto sheltered circles, where poverty was a foreign word. The number of long-term unemployed keeps rising. Worst off are families with children. Every fifth child in the US lives in poverty today.

“The situation was bad before, don’t get me wrong,” Bich Ha Pham, research director with the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies (FPWA), a welfare organization in New York City, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “But this time, it could happen to anybody.”

And nobody seems to care. Poverty wasn’t an issue during the midterm elections — and it won’t be an issue now that the spendthrift deficit hawks of the Republican Party have reclaimed the House of Representatives.

…

It wasn’t long ago that Pam Brown, too, rarely worried about those who fell through the social safety net — or even feared that fate for herself. “I wish I had been more engaged,” she says now. “Wall Street gives you such a comfort with its bonuses. In didn’t understand the stringency of your life not being your own anymore, of losing control like that.”

How this could have happened is a cautionary tale about the dark side of the affluent society. That’s where Brown lived happily for a long time — until the floor fell out from under her feet.