I took my eleven-year-old son to see “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” over the weekend. One of the ads shown prior to the movie was asking if the American Dream were alive or dead. After seeing that ad I looked at my son and wondered, “what has become of the American Dream?”

When I was a child my dad would regale me with tales of America’s founding. Of his childhood growing up during the Depression, of how he moved off of the family farm so that he would lose his deferment so that he could join the Navy and serve our nation during WWII. He would tell the stories of FDR giving hope to a beleaguered nation. I remember tales of my grandmother feeding hobos as they sat on the back stoop. Of how there were markings on the fence post of the family farm that meant the hobos could get a meal there. Stories of how my dad, his siblings and my grandparents never lost hope because they lived in America.

Most of all my dad would talk about the American Dream and how we were the best nation on earth (American exceptionalism). How people of other nations would always put the United States down; however, we were always the first nation they turned to when they needed help. He instilled in me the need to serve this nation, to do my part for the greater good. How every man in America could make his mark just by hard work, no, you would never get rich, but, you would make enough money to buy a house, raise a family and retire comfortably.

My dad never talked much about the American Dream after his boss broke the union. I think at the point the American Dream died a little bit for my dad. Still, I kept the American Dream alive in my heart. I believed in it. After high school I joined the Army. I really had no choice at the time; there were no jobs and my meager college fund had been spent keeping the family afloat after my dad lost his job. In the back of my mind I knew I was serving not out necessity, but out of a calling to serve my nation.

I served my four years and came home a different person—but I knew that now I could start to live my American Dream. The only problem was that I had changed and so had the world I had known. The only jobs I could find were low wage retail jobs. The American Dream seemed to be just out of my reach.

I look around me today, I have a good job but the wages are actually less than what my dad made thirty years ago (when adjusted for inflation). I own a home and I am a divorced single father raising my son. At this point I recall having arguments with my father about how Social Security would not be there for me and how he would always counter with, “don’t worry, it will be there for you.” It is looking more and more like it will not be there for me, or for my son. This is one time where I wish he could prove me wrong.

Looking at my son I look back at my own life and realize that I do not have the stories of hope to give my son. I grew up in an era where it was more important to cut taxes on the rich than to provide help for those in need. Where corporations that are too big to fail are more important than people struggling to get by. An era where the unemployed are considered leeches on society while big businesses get away with paying little or no taxes.

I look at my son…and I wonder, will the American Dream ever come true for him? Will there be decent good paying jobs available to him as he grows older? Will this second era of robber barons, greed and theft be replaced by a new progressive era where we as a nation get out priorities straight and start catering to the needs of the many, instead of the needs of the few?

I do not know the answers to those questions—and did not realize that I would be asking them. I started out writing a whole different post about the American Dream and ended up taking a turn I had not expected to take. In my mind, the American Dream and American exceptionalism are both dead and I am not sure that either one of them were ever real to begin with…