I was recently asked a simple question by the BCA Marburg Director, Christopher Riggs. It was a very simple question, and the U.S. passport currently sitting in my desk drawer should have lent to a very simple answer. Out of curiosity, he asked me if we believed in America, given the current state of our union. I wanted to say "yes", but I couldn't for the life of me. The mantra I had recited every school day for twelve years, our patriotic war hymn sung at every sporting event and national holiday, every majestic purple mountain and amber wave of grain compelled me to say "yes". And yet, as I took a moment to actually ponder the question, I realized that I didn’t. The America I was taught to believe in and told to revere was not, and is not, the country I currently call home.
Disillusionment in the American Dream is something with which most of us have become acquainted somewhere in our education and/or consumption of media. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is required reading in practically every high school literature class. To be an American is to be disillusioned with the country at some point or another. In a land as great as ours, at least one person is always going to feel alienated by our laws, our customs, or our language. This is why Fitzgerald’s words have endured through the last century. At some point, every American has felt that our national dream has passed us by, even the loathsome one-percenters.
The Great Gatsby is among a handful of novels that has truly stuck with me over the years. The comparatively naïve high-schooler I once was sympathized with the love story behind it, for I have been Jay Gatsby more times than I care to remember. I think even then the story resonated with me on a deeper level, if only unconsciously. Even at sixteen, I felt there was something amiss with the American-centric world in which I lived, but could never quite verbalize it.
My father also read The Great Gatsby in high school, and we discussed the book for several nights once I had finished it. One evening, he explained that the Jazz Age was a period of excess, and that anything worth doing was worth over-doing. I had heard that same sentence several times on VH1 Classic to describe the 1980’s. The Great Gatsby could have just have easily have taken place in the 80’s, and its themes would still hold true. We now look back on the 1980’s with nostalgia, as the last great American decade. The last era in which everything was comfortable in the United States. We remember it as the end of our second "Golden Age"; however, our nation had already slipped into the realm of silver, and was rapidly fading into bronze.
While the novel was set in the Jazz Age, it was still very much a critique of it. The wealth that accumulated from the California Gold Rush, and manifest destiny, and our growing economic influence in South and Central America was seemingly endless. The U.S. was in our first true state of prosperity. It was the first true Golden Age of America. This is when the American dream finally began. If poor immigrants and farmers could go on to become billionaires and heads of state, then even the loftiest of risks seemed less severe. By the time we reached the Jazz Age, our people had decided that our nation was too big to fail. The sun was finally beginning to set on the British Empire, and beginning to rise on ours.
We are all at least vaguely familiar with what happened at the end of the Jazz Age. The nation endured years of famine, poverty, and war. Our Golden Age had ended almost as quickly as it began. At its core, Fitzgerald uses The Great Gatsby as a cautionary tale, warning future generations to be weary of our own arrogance. The United States is not too big to crumble, and that very arrogance could be our undoing.
Since the end of the Second World War, we have been told to pound our chests in pride, and tear up each time we see the American flag. Because we are citizens of the greatest country that there has ever been or will be. We did have it better than most of the world for a few decades. While most of Europe was rebuilding, we were taking advantage of our head-start to fiercely prove that capitalism would eventually triumph over communism. The United States and the Soviet Union were the titans of the modern world, valiantly defending their respective ideologies. The U.S. was one of the few allied countries not to suffer severe damage to our infrastructure. The 1950’s were a period of brief recovery. The 1960’s and 1970’s were a time of unprecedented progress for education, the standard of living, and the economy.
By the 1980’s, we had reached a second "Jazz Age". Our economy was flourishing endlessly, and the communist way of life would not survive the decade. Things could not get better for America, yet most of the population thought it would. We had once again become too big to fail, an idea which is historically false. Every great empire in history has fallen eventually. Some collapsed spontaneously, and others just faded out of existence. In the 1980’s, we believed that we were the exception. Most people alive had won a couple of wars (more or less), rebuilt the economy to a state of prosperity, and saw an unprecedented improvement of the quality of life. They had no reason to believe that the U.S. was going anywhere but up.
The excess and promising future of the 1980’s faded through the 1990’s, we were less arrogant, but still not entirely humble. America reigned in the decadence of the 1980’s, but the nation still felt that we were invulnerable to attack. Sure, other countries possessed nuclear weapons, but we had more. We had a beyond-adequate military that was leaps and bounds ahead of the next best thing, at least in a technological sense. Even as we entered the new millennium, we believed that no one would be foolhardy enough to attack the impenetrable, unflinching, almighty United States of America.
For me, September 11th marked the beginning of my comprehension of American history. Ask anyone over the age of nineteen, and you will find their memories of that day surprisingly clear. I was in kindergarten at the time, and had begun the fierce indoctrination of patriotism by my baby-boomer teacher. We had a solid hour everyday (or at least it felt like it) devoted to the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and the singing of various patriotic songs. My education began with the idea that I was part of the greatest nation in all of written history, and that notion was challenged within the month. The weeks following the terrorist attacks were a period of fearful curiosity, answered by equally fearful adults. Our reign had been challenged, and the adults in the lives of many millennials had no contingency plan in place. They could not comprehend the contradiction that stood before them.
My knowledge of world events was passive for most of my early education. I was aware that we were fighting a war against terror, or one in favor of democracy that largely seemed to not be going well. My country’s involvement in the Middle East lasted nearly a decade after President George W. Bush declared that our mission had been accomplished. We, the loathsome millennials, were unsure whether supporting our nation’s troops meant prolonging the war, or ending it. My generation matured through a war in which most causalities were self-inflicted, and quickly realized that bumper stickers were not enough to combat the demons inside our veterans. Our nation begrudgingly declared a draw in yet another war, with the aim still as unclear as the last one.
I watched my nation’s economy collapse and crumble before my very eyes at thirteen. Years of high gas prices and inflation were only inflamed by the events of 2008. My generation saw an economic downturn that was comparable only to the Great Depression. While the "Great Recession" was not nearly as severe, many of us felt it when Christmas rolled around, and watched our parents tighten their financial belts for the next few years. Many of my middle class peers still struggle to make ends meet from time to time.
To say millennials are disillusioned is the understatement of this century. We were born into a nation severely suffering from delusions of grandeur, and have spent the last twenty-odd-years seeing those notions being challenged. The idea that America is the greatest nation on Earth falls farther away from reality each year. Statistically speaking, we are not even close to being the greatest nation on Earth in any metric, excluding gun violence and incarceration. Nevertheless, those older and (allegedly) wiser than us still cling to this falsehood.
We have been promised prosperity that our grandparents and great-grandparents had. At twenty-one, I can barely afford a monthly train pass, yet many of our grandparents were already homeowners with families by our age. We are enduring longer and ever more strenuous education for the prospect of jobs that may or may not be there when we finally graduate. Many of our grandfathers received diplomas and headed straight to the steel mill or factory. While I do not yearn for factory work, it would have been nice to have been given the option.
My friend and colleague in millennial disillusionment, Cameron Shultz, summed up our generation in a single sentence on the subway:
“We never had a fucking choice.”
When my grandfather attended college, he was attempting to educate himself, to become a better person. Our generation attends college hoping to, one day, survive on our own. We are cynical about the state of our union, because we are coming of age into a period of inevitable self-destruction when we were promised that a job with a decent wage, 2.1 children, and a three- bedroom house with a white picket fence was the very least our country had to offer. For most of us, our best bet is moving back in with our parents while we whittle away at the massive debt we were forced to accumulate in a job for which we are underpaid and over-qualified.
I’m sure the older generations will doubtlessly say that my generation is whiny and entitled, yet this cannot be further from the truth. We are driving ourselves mad with stress trying to obtain half the prosperity our grandparents had, without bankrupting ourselves in the process. If nothing else, we have held on to the purest truth of our nation. Hard work can accomplish anything, and we are clinging to this idea, hoping that it will one day hold true for us as it did for the generations before us. In spite of this, every day we seem to learn the opposite.
We never wanted to be this cynical or broken down at our age. We did not do this to ourselves. We have been taunted by the green light hanging from our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ pier. They taught us to believe in a dream that had already died, a perfect impossibility. They promised us a future that had already been sold or gambled away. My generation has come of age into a nation in denial of its true state, and are being blamed for the destruction brought on by our forefathers. We wanted so badly to believe in America, but have grown up to find that there is very little left worth believing in. I am proud of what this nation once was, but know that I will never see such prosperity myself. None of us wanted to stop believing in that America.
None of us had a choice.
