American Dream

i was reading (reading you know is a form of work) a piece on Red State(a conservative website) about secular journalists getting Christianity and creationism all wrong. The piece found fault with the continual regurgitation of this one sentence.

If we establish Earth’s age at 4.5 billion years, then we contradict the biblical view that God created the world just 6,500 years ago.

Erik Erickson claims that no Christian he knows believes the earth is only 6,500 years old. The reason for this is that in the first days when God was creating the world there was no sun or moon so how could anyone know what length a day was. But he does go on to say that according to Gallup polls many Christians believe that modern man was created in the past 10,000 years.

According to the fossil record so far…Homo sapiens (that’s us) started spreading out from Africa 200,000 years ago and became fully modern approximately 50,000 years ago. These numbers could still be significantly wrong and may need to be pushed back further because relying on fossils to paint an historical picture is only valid when you can find fossils.

All sorts of climatic conditions and geologic strata are necessary for the preservation of bones. Unless sediments quickly hardened into stone the bones would have decomposed. Finding an area that has all the appropriate conditions for fossilization plus is in a vicinity that humans occupied is like finding a needle in a haystack.  Digging up the entire land and ocean bottoms is never going to happen so we have to make do with the little we find. In some parts of the world excavation has barely begun.  These new areas of exploration can contribute a wealth of information that may in future change prevailing views concerning mans age.

So in changing prevailing views you must be wondering where i’m going with all this. If a large percentage of Christians (according to Gallup polling) believe that man was created within the last 10,000 years then what other misleading information have human beings in general bought into?

Can you see a misleading mechanism in the term “American Dream?”  The two words alone are so well known all around the world that there is no need for me to define it. One mechanism that is used with these two words is the idea that everyone can be wealthy if they work hard enough. Just repeating the words “American Dream” will induce the reader to identify with the outcome or ideal even if it will never occur in their lifetime.

The significance of the fact that most hard workers will never be wealthy is lost in the pursuit of the dream. The dream of wealth holds more weight than the reality of a life spent working hard, paying bills and putting some away for a future retirement that hopefully will not be decimated by a medical bankruptcy.

Someone, probably not you will get there and even if it isn’t you, you will continue to support the idea that the “American Dream” is not a myth.

Depending on a folk tale to get you to the pot of gold maintains the status quo for those who have already achieved that status. All of us create the misleading reality by buying into the idea that hard work will make you wealthy. It might make you comfortable but it probably won’t make most of us wealthy. It will most definitely make you want more than you can afford by keeping you in debt for most of your life but the upside is that your wants will help to churn the economy.

Popular culture is limiting when it pigeonholes the ideals of wealth and hard work. There are a lot of wealthy people that don’t work hard in the physical sense of the word just as there are a lot of people that do work incredibly hard in the physical sense of the word and are not wealthy. So how do you rationalize these two types of people with the ideal of hard work and wealth?

Intellectual wrestlers will note the exaggerated example; ideological purists will argue the fine points. The ideological audience accepts the suffering and punishment of the hard workers that haven’t become wealthy. It is their fault for not having “made it” they must not have worked hard enough or saved enough because everyone can make it otherwise the ideal would be false and therefore a myth.

This myth that wealth and work go together is perpetuated by an elite that uses the media to keep those less comfortable from ever considering what the definition of work means. As long as you are in debt you can’t fight the myth. The truth is everyone will not be wealthy or even comfortable even though they have spent their whole lives working hard.

i started writing this piece yesterday so i thought it was appropriate to end it with a quote i saw this morning from a fellow who calls himself the

Ministry of Truth

“Corporate profits are at record highs, and so is poverty. There is a reason for that. Your poverty is their profit. Keeping you poor means keeping you dependent on the loan sharks. As you get poorer, they get richer. It isn't a coincidence. It is on purpose.

Republicans like to cry that the government is enslaving us, but the reality is that Wall Street and the Banks are enslaving us, the rich are enslaving us and starving us so they can charge us a fee to lend us money." Ministry of Truth

If you are in debt the things you think you own you don't. You are just renting them from the bank or the credit card company or the credit union until you have everything paid off. Only when it is all paid off do you truly own it.