Land of Opportunity
What America Has Meant, and Should Strive to Mean
Ah, sweet Land of Opportunity. It’s the allure that led the early European settlers to sail over to a strange new world, that spurred our own denizens in the 19th century to trail west into the unknown, and that brought wave upon wave of immigrants to our shores, my own family (arriving from the USSR in the early 80’s) among them. It is economical possibility, but beyond that the feeling of being able to live as one wishes to live, in speak openly and think freely. It is the feeling of controlling one’s own destiny, of believing that your work and your ideas can lead you to a brighter future.
It is a beautiful thing when it is present, when people feel they can dream. A sense of economic mobility drives productivity and prevents class conflict. A confidence in free expression allows for effective discourse and the inflow of new ideas. And the ability to aspire fuels positive living and hopeful, happy citizens.
But all too often these days, that opportunity is not felt, that feeling of controlling one’s own destiny is critically absent, in its place a sense of helplessness in the face of a bleak future. This is the outlook underlying unrest, violence, and upheaval. However justified you may take this pessimism to be, understanding what drives it, understanding the forces that undermine opportunity, is absolutely essential to healing our nation and making it the best it can be.
These forces are not some grand cabal bent on destruction. They are the natural obstacles against growing and sustaining opportunity, and our repeated failures as a society to effectively understand and combat them. The need for economic mobility will always be at odds with the need for economic stability, with the demand that wealth earned may be kept and passed on. People will look out for their own, leveraging any resources at their disposal to better their lots and their families’. Any form of power, if it can be abused, will be abused, and systems that fail to provide proper checks against abuses will see their corruption grow.
Amidst all the talk of racism and the malicious elements that have fueled inequality, we cannot lose sight of the ways that well-minded policy has brutally failed us. A tough approach to crime, fueled by an eagerness to weed out unsavory elements and clean communities, has produced cycles of massive incarceration and left many marginalized youth without vitally needed support systems. Charitable, lenient welfare policy dating from the New Deal discouraged nuclear family formation, failed to fully account for the social difficulties of children in single-mother households, and ultimately perpetuated the poverty it sought to alleviate. Even the noble notion of using college to uplift our youth can backfire terribly, leading costs to spiral, the value of education to actually deflate, and generations to be left with increasing mountains of debt, a lack of useful skills, and a sense of years wasted.
In so many of the ways we have sought to create opportunity, we have failed, and we would not be the first nation to face major upheaval as a result. Men seeing no way up and no way forward playing under the rules of their society have been at the heart of countless revolutions throughout history. Here, where the hunger for opportunity is greater than anywhere else, where for centuries immigrants from all over the world have flocked in search of new possibilities, failing to provide a sense of hope is something we cannot afford to do.
If we are going to move forward and improve, then we need to recognize our missteps and the complexities that underlie them. Creating opportunity is not simple. Sustaining opportunity, in the face of corruptive tendencies, is not simple. Good intentions are not enough to solve the problems we face, but strong policy, grown through effective discourse and a thorough critical process, can help more people claim, or reclaim, that feeling of opportunity. And it is a beautiful feeling.
