It’s really time to cease talking about the American Dream as a generational guarantee. The American Dream of homeownership, lifetime job with retirement planning, new car in the two car garage, husband and wife with children, college for the kids, yearly family vacation, and thus forth doesn’t exist any longer and hasn’t for at least one generation if not two. Holding this out as a promise and a goal is societal cruelty. It’s taking the carrot off the stick and flogging young Americans with the stick until any hope of a functional, prosperous future is replaced by the bitter duo of apathy and cynicism.

In America, focus on STEM education, hard work, professionalism, and the Nuclear Family unit has been systematically deemphasized and replaced by relativistic woke pseudo-ideals. Our economy has devolved to a place where employee/employer loyalty is second to unrealized career goals and vulnerable to frail business sustainability. It’s easier to find conflict than cooperation nowadays, Americans more and more feel abandoned and isolated from each other, and this all combined is what ended the widely held possibility of the traditional American Dream. That dream is gone, it’s now a historic entity in the story of the United States of America.

But it doesn’t mean we can’t create a new American Dream that better fits the educational, economic, fiscal, professional, and ethical realities of the 2020s. We’re not looking at simply measured or managed expectations. It’s a matter of defining what America is as a people and a culture and what common beliefs and goals do we share. Common sense requires these common beliefs, and common sense is rediscovering the strong ethical and moral national standard that fell to nebulous uncertainty the more we coddled woke values instead of strengthening community and family values. Woke divides. Community and family unites. And these central community and family values are the stability we require in defining our new American Dream.

This becomes a very era specific commentary by citing the inspiring American Spirit of the citizens hit hardest by Hurricane Helene. In the face of regional decimation communities have come together to survive and rebuild, independent of the failed executive regime incapable of funding and organizing federal disaster response and relief. Political strife in Appalachia is unwanted and unessential. No matter an individual’s ideology, community and human life is most important. Common beliefs, common sense, common goals, and common values are what matters, not divisive campaign nonsense.

From tragedy comes hope and comes also example. When confronted by unavoidable adversity Americans retain our capacity for compassion and cooperation. These are the type of values we must nurture and grow. We have these values innately in common. This is the American Spirit that birthed our republic, it never dwindled or disappeared, it’s been only in hibernation until absolutely needed, and the American Spirit we’re seeing in southern Appalachia is a perfect starting point for our new American Dream.