Is the American Dream on the Rise or at Risk?
Early one overcast morning in late January, less than a week after America’s 45th President was inaugurated, a group of Chicago’s brightest civic leaders, educators, and concerned citizens gathered inside IDEO’s West Loop studio, eager to debate and have a dialogue about the current state of the American Dream. The event was the latest iteration of our Creative Tensions series, an interactive event format IDEO created in partnership with the Sundance Institute Theatre Program where participants are asked a this-or-that question and reveal where they stand on the issue by where they stand in the room.
In addition to the growing sense of national unease, locally, we in Chicago were also struggling to find sure footing in the aftershocks of the Department of Justice’s incendiary report on the Chicago Police, an historic, 18-month-long state budget impasse, and a year of soaring gun violence in our most poverty-stricken neighborhoods. But rather than hunker down and hide away through this winter of bad news, these brave, optimistic citizens chose to meet and join us in a new kind of empathy-building conversation.
The remarkable thing about other Creative Tensions events I’ve been a part of is the physicality of the conversation. By design, everyone who has a body has a voice. There is no silent majority, and there is no ambiguity about where people metaphorically stand. Standing for the entire duration of the hour-long session, participants move across a spectrum in response to polarizing prompts.
Our January Creative Tensions was no less inspiring. To kick off the conversation, we invited three distinguished experts to voice their opinions: Cheryl Hughes, Senior Director of Civic Engagement at The Chicago Community Trust; Sharon Legenza, the Executive Director of Housing Action Illinois; and Myles X Mendoza, Founder of the Untapped Potential Project. As the main facilitator, I had the honor of calling on outliers, people gathered in clusters, or anyone else who seemed to be responding in an interesting or unexpected way. I wanted to hear a variety of opinions, not just those of our special guests. Moving through questions such as whether people thought their parent’s lives were better or worse than theirs — and whether they expected their children’s lives to be better or worse than their own — participants reflected deeply on their place in the arc of our nation’s history and on what, if anything, they could do to change its trajectory. Sadly, most participants felt their children will have a harder time achieving their version of the American Dream.
The most touching moments where when people were so emotionally moved by another’s response that they began to physically move closer to them. In response to the question, “Technology is Making the American Dream: More Possible or Less Possible,” an articulate, young, tech-savvy participant stood far outside of the “Less Possible” boundary. I had to call him out and ask why someone who, on the surface, seemed like a poster child of the tech economy wasn’t taking the position of advocate. His thoughtful opinion was that artificial intelligence and automation were, without a doubt, going to leave many people behind, and that, in many ways, it was already too late. He was genuinely concerned for how we, as a society, were going to absorb and support the instability caused by technological progress and was worried about what he perceived as a lack of serious work being done to create the security we all need to make the American Dream possible. Several participants who had a more optimistic, and perhaps less nuanced, point of view about technology listened intently — and then started moving closer to the young man.
Similarly, the tension of “Is the American Dream: About Safety or About Opportunity” sparked an interesting discussion after one person asked: “What if job safety is a red herring that puts workers more at risk because it makes them complacent and overly reliant on benevolent institutions?”
A couple of people who grew up on the South Side of Chicago spoke very viscerally about what it feels like to see the Loop — the city’s bustling downtown business district — when you look at it far away to the north. The success and power of that modern skyline, with its wall of skyscrapers and everything they stand for, feels so out of reach and outside the reality of life on the South Side. The geography of the city magnifies the challenge of achieving the American Dream, which seems to some like a broken promise.
Others in the audience grew up in small town or rural America and felt that their urban fates had been quite different from those of the friends and family they left behind. Post-election, their Rust Belt brethren had fallen sharply on the other side of the political divide, and many seemed to still be grappling with the uneasy tension they so recently felt within their own families or communities over the December holidays.
Overall, the group was grateful that they had achieved some aspect of the American Dream through a combination of hard work, a bit of luck, and lots of help from others, including the government. And they all seemed to sense how very different the paths were that brought them together at this unique moment in time. As the event wound down, new personal connections were struck up. While talk of building walls was still looming heavily in the media ether outside, our Creative Tension participants, reenergized by a morning of empathic, nuanced, and respectful discussion, were busy building bridges and designing ways to hold the door open for others trying to achieve their version of the American Dream.
