The myth of the United States - Part 1

Today I will make a lot of enemies in the US, as the title of my blog today will touch, and may offend some people born in this country. If it does I am very sorry.
This year I celebrate my 25th anniversary in the United States of America. As such I will include here a few observations that I have picked up during all these years.
It is very simplistic to play the blame game, so I will try not to fall into that trap. For those who know me, and know my points of view, you know that many times it is almost impossible to be completely detached.
The reason I called this blog the myth of the US is because I look at the country that I came to live to in 1985 and I say “where did it go to”. I’m not even comparing it to the 50s and/or 60s because I was not living here then. I am saying what happened.
These are a few reasons:
We have been told for 30 years to go and have a good time, and now it is time to pay the credit card bill, and we have no money to do so.
Another reason is because we live in total fantasy thinking that this country’s best days lay ahead. I’ve lived through some of the same mistakes, but back there we would say “the problem is that we have a corrupt government”, or during military dictatorships we would say “the problem is that we have no freedom of expression, we are being repressed”.
When I used to go door to door selling cable I would run into other people that came from South America, and I would ask them if the US had fulfilled all their expectations, and many times I would here the same answer, that when their were living in their countries they would view “El Norte”, the north, as many times we refer to the United States, as the MECCA of a human being, but that when they finally came here they realized that it was not everything they had imagined, that life was just as difficult as at home, and that they were far from their native land, far from their loved ones, with a language that they didn’t know well, and that they were hardly making ends meet. In other words it was not as good as they had been told. This takes me to my last point, we still think of the US as the land that everyone want to come to. Not really. The Europeans, arguably the largest group of people that came through Ellis Island are no longer coming to these shores. Why? They see no benefit, no incentive. The people that are coming to the these shores are people from impoverished nations, primarily from South America. Probably, with a dream that when they get here it is no longer fulfilled.