"Is the American Dream Fading?"

According to the latest census bureau data, nearly one in two people in the United States (that would be half of us) is now living either in or near poverty. Is this really because they're all just too lazy to do anything about it? Multi-millions of American jobs have vaporized over the past twenty years, now outsourced to other countries or turned into low-paid temporary positions without benefits. Yet the rich keep blaming the workers that made the rich rich in hopes that the workers will keep blaming themselves.

So American citizens -- no longer qualified for unemployment assistance (that's the real reason that the rate has gone down) -- are frantically looking for work or accepting work they know will not take care of themselves and their families. People of Color are more than twice as likely to be shut out of the job market. And many U.S. citizens were already strung out on credit because of trying to keep up the illusion that they weren't poor before the most recent economic setbacks. When are we going to stop kidding ourselves? More people are on foodstamps now because there are fewer and fewer jobs every day which means more and more poverty for more and more people. This is not rocket science requiring fancy economic analysis.

In the film clip above, Cornel West, Tavis Smiley and Barbara Ehrenreich address this situation without ever once sounding sensationalistic or raising even one puff of academic dust. Watch the clip. Show it to some friends. Start a conversation. Let's face reality together.

I recently came across a quote saying something like: "Facing something might not change it, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." My version: "Everything I ever refused to face eventually hit me in the back of the head." I'm just sayin'.