Reality Check 101

            It used to be that achieving the American Dream was fairly easily understood.  The idea was thatAmericawas uniquely a land of opportunity.  If a person worked hard and lived honorably, they had the freedom to make or break their future according to their abilities.  It took the country too long to afford many minorities a proper piece of the action but even then there were success stories.

            The popular conscience understood limitations to achieving the dream.  For one thing, as a mater of common sense, self-fulfillment or making a better life were not excuses for criminal methods.  Neither were social services (outside of Social Security investments) part of the dream.  If either were the case, our heroes of achievement would have been the Bernie Madoffs and welfare frauds of the world.

            Using social services is not necessarily wrong.  Every society has an undeniable need for them.  But in theUnited States, at every level, the relationship between the people and their government, from local to federal, has changed dramatically over the last fifty years.

            The change has been based on very skillful redefinitions, equivocations really, of terms people thought they understood.  Social services have been packaged to mean social entitlement, the idea that individuals have a right to be bailed out and then supported by government programs when things go south in their lives.  Propping up other lives with taxpayer money has even become a matter of social justice, most especially for progressives (liberals).

            It is true that a just society must exercise compassion and love.  Many would say that compassion and love necessarily require government enforced entitlements to the down-and-out as a matter of social justice.  But since, as far as God is concerned, compassion and love are principally matters of the heart, entitlements and government mandates are not compassion at all but coercion.  Enabling a person’s weaknesses or inappropriate behavior is not love, but moral weakness.

            Increasingly, the American Dream is being commandeered and redefined to fit the false notion of global citizenship for a kind of trans-national entitlement to social services.  The process is evident in the uproar overArizona’s new immigration law.  Locally it just exposed itself through a lawsuit filed against Ottawa County Clerk Dan Krueger by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF).  Krueger’s offense was requiring a social security number for government services, something citizens have been doing all our lives.

            A recent statement by MALDEF’s Ricardo Meza perfectly illustrates the mindset behind the suit.  Meza was quoted as saying, “All persons, regardless of immigration status, have a constitutional right to marry”.  How is it that the U.S. Constitution is applied to citizens of a foreign power living in willful violation ofUnited Stateslaw?

            Abusive government-mandated compassion is being justified by equating national citizenship with global citizenship.  But citizenship is a political concept.  In order to be a citizen, there must exist a political body to be a part of.  Because the world, fortunately, has no such political structure, there is no world community or global citizenship.  Both are well established fairy tales.  Because civil rights are established by national statute, there is no valid claim to any kind of trans-national civil rights.

            Achieving the American Dream, whatever it means to each person, is by its nature, American.  By definition, it succeeds only because ofAmerica’s exceptionalism and only through her system of laws and opportunities.  To expect social services in order to achieve success, especially while existing outside of American law, is a violation of the very notion ofAmerica.