I love the United States. It is because of this love that I say this: The U.S. is not the greatest country in the world. 

Based on some of the discussions I’ve had in my college classes, it seems very few of my peers have ever been taught about history in a way that doesn’t praise the Americans. It wasn’t until my junior year of high school when I was assigned Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” that I was exposed to an American history that didn’t glorify the Americans.  It told the story of the oppressed Americans: the Native Americans, early American factory workers, African Americans and the American women. 

I think this gap in the teaching of history has contributed to the pervasiveness of American exceptionalism. Without knowing the stories of the oppressed, we tend to blindly credit American ideals such as freedom and equal opportunity as the reasons the U.S. is so great. Anyone can live the American dream if they work hard enough for it, right? 

This is no longer the case. I say “no longer” because I know the American dream was once attainable. My mom lived the American dream. She started working as a teller for Bank of America in 1982. Thirty-two years later, she is the SVP of Corporate Communications for the bank. I won’t go into her whole life story, but she’s amazing, and she worked extremely hard to get to where she is. 

Unfortunately, I don’t think what my mom has accomplished in her life can be accomplished by everyone from my generation.  When searching for a job, a college degree is no longer an added bonus that boosts your resume. A college degree is a necessity, and the cost of earning one has increased more than 500 percent since 1980, according to the 2012 documentary Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream.

Additionally, wealthy people have been pumping money into the political system to make it work in their favor and disproportionately hurt poor people.  In 2010, 400 of the richest Americans controlled more wealth than the bottom half of American households, or roughly 150 million people.

Paul Piff, a social psychologist researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, conducted a study in which people played an openly rigged game of Monopoly. One player was randomly assigned to be rich. The rich player started with more money than the other player, collected more money when he or she passed “Go,” and was able to roll two die, thereby giving the rich player more opportunities to buy property than the poor players.  He found that even though the game was openly rigged, the rich players tended to feel entitled to win. 

It doesn’t bother me so much that wealthy people spend excessive amounts of money on mansions and cars. At least spending money on unnecessary material items helps fuel the economy. It bothers me much more when wealthy people spend their money lobbying for politicians to sign bills that will allow their families to stay perpetually wealthy and make it even more difficult for poor people to escape poverty. 

“The idea of the American dream is everyone’s got an equal opportunity; you just have to decide to play,” Piff said. “But in fact, there are large groups of people that experience the game as unfair. The opportunity’s not there. All the rules have been decided. The property’s already been bought up, and the money’s already in the hands of the other players.” 

Equal opportunity is an ideal, but it’s not the reality. This is not to say the U.S. should become socialist. The U.S. economy, which is somewhere between pure capitalism and pure socialism, has worked relatively well in the past. It is the increasing amount of political corruption that has led income inequality to become such a problem in the U.S.   

I love the U.S., but we have to recognize its downfalls. If we continue to allow our patriotism to blind us, we will undoubtedly watch the country we love continue on its regressive spiral.  

Send Megan your thoughts at technician-viewpoint@ncsu.edu.