"Borrowing the American Dream"

The essay below was written by Anamaria Todor. She is an American Studies student and wrote this essay as part of a final project for my class. I found this piece to be extremely complex and enlightening – and I’m hoping you can learn something about Romanian society from her perspective. Oh, and her flawless English doesn’t exactly detract from the essay either. Her e-mail address is anna_todor@clicknet.ro and she said she doesn’t mind if people contact her with questions. :)

Borrowing the American Dream

At a first glance, the Romanian and American societies seem to have nothing in common. The first belongs to a country with a slowly emerging economy, while the second is over-saturated with both economical and technological development. Still, I urge you to take a closer look. You will soon discover that Romanians share a distorted version of John Locke’s opinion that “in the beginning, all the world was America” (Hochschild, Jennifer – “Facing up the American Dream: Race, Class and Soul of the Nation”). At least culturally, for Romanians, all people still belong to this untamed American Paradise. Romania may never have been America, but Romanians were Americans too. People of Romanian ethnicity believe this to such an extent that they take the right to be the owner of their personal American dream.

Is this irony or just the direct consequence of an erroneous advertising strategy? Analyzing Romanian society from the historical point of view will underline the following conclusion: Romanians still psychologically live in the shadow of the communist threat. A contrast arises between the image of a country still trying to shake off the communist nightmare and the vibrant American dream. Why endure an opportunity purgatory when you can “work hard and play by the rules” in order to “be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you?” (President Bill Clinton, speech of Democratic Leadership Council,1993; Hochschild, Jennifer – “Facing up the American Dream: Race, Class and Soul of the Nation”). Taking this portrait of the American Dream even further, Romanians omit what Jennifer Hochschild described as the absolute side of pursuing the Dream: “reaching some threshold of well-being” or “a chance for self-respect”. To Romanians, the Dream is mostly a relative concept by excellence, implying not only to reach over the living standards of others but also to leave the others behind. It’s tight competition, that can’t function in an abstract context. It’s literally walking over dead bodies.

You may already wonder why I keep calling it the American Dream and not the Romanian dream or something similar. This is because Romanians don’t really have a national dream. They have chosen to borrow other cultural trends (and indeed it all became a “trend”), go to other countries –especially the USA- and loose their own cultural identity. Let us delve deeper into details.

Due to the Democratic revolution of 1989 Romania should be a country of all opportunities, a new ground. It’s all about clearing away the past and starting a new future. In fact, the Romanian society doesn’t have some of the serious problems of the American one. Let’s take healthcare into consideration. According to Publicagenda.com (“Overview: Health care”), the American society is based on the managed care system, which means that the health care of most people is managed by private companies, or HMOs (health maintenance organizations). The state only covers the elderly through a program known as Medicare and an estimate of 40 million poor people through the Medicaid program. This leads to poor quality and a low range of services, as HMOs try to limit the expenses by imposing certain conditions to the patients: visiting a certain doctor or hospital, buying cheap drugs, for example. Romania, on the other hand, is closer to achieving the well known concept of universal healthcare. The state covers most health care expenses, it gives full coverage to children, old people, the employed and –in less complex cases- even the unemployed at the cost of bigger income taxes. The technological burst has left Romanian medical facilities behind though. Full health coverage renders the state incapable of supplying hospitals with top-tech medical apparatus and sometimes even with vital medicine. As a direct consequence, patients have an unwritten “Bill of rights” in Romania, which is not strengthened by law though. Practically, a patient is free to visit the medical institution he or she likes and can sew anyone from the doctor he is unsatisfied with to the Healthcare Ministry or the State. In the United States, “at least 40 states has passed some versions of” this “Bill of rights”, “but the Congress is still considering national legislation” and “managed-care firms are generally immune from being sued for their decisions” (Publicagenda.com - “Overview: Health care”).

Though the system is not perfect, Romania has never faced such a huge healthcare crisis as the States have. Moreover, it was never a national issue, to affect Presidential Elections (see the New York Times’ “It was Clinton vs. Obama on Health care” article). This is just one small example to prove that the situation is not so grim in Romania. Still, people here choose to swallow up their national spirit and add up to the USA immigration problem. Www.census.org statistics point out that over 367,310 Americans are of Romanian ancestry. Immigration, manifested in huge population movements into America from over the Ocean or from South America, menaces the economical balance of the country, especially in its illegal form. More and more Americans are raising the “unfairness” argument, which states a strong belief that “illegal immigrants use more in public services than they contribute in the local taxes” and “get a better deal from the government than legal citizens” (Kronholz, June. “Stoking the Immigration Fire”. Wall Street Journal, 2007). Immigrants are also seen as culturally overwhelming and as jobs stealers. They offer to work for lower wages and sometimes surpass the employer’s expectations. For example, some Romanians that illegally travel to the USA are quite skilled in their field of domain.

In the end, why are Romanians slowly fading away into the USA cultural mosaic? It may be their desire to forget an unwanted past or their hope for a better living. Or their refusal to see reality from an outer perspective. Or maybe just the colorful postcards, or the blinking text of Internet ads. Can’t we all borrow dreams?