The Great American Slumber

By Christopher Tobias / Winter 2025

The "American Dream" is a lie. I know you don't want to hear it, but it is. Love is also a lie. And these two terms and ideas are not mutually exclusive. They share a strong bond. They are interwoven and entangled, much like the fabric of the torn and faded stars and stripes of the American flag. I wasn't always so cynical. Well, that is also a lie.

When I was three years old (my earliest memory), I witnessed something that would be the catalyst for me to question the reality that was staged before me. My father, Scott Richard Tobias, moved to Oregon from Los Angeles to find work. A war veteran, he was like many of the soldiers who came back from war who were neglected and discarded after they "served their country." He was attempting to redeem his inability to uphold his position in the hierarchy that society forced upon him: the provider.

The clouds were painted across the Oregon night sky as my toddler feet stumbled out to the front porch where several family members huddled around pointing to the twinkling lights above. My mother held my hand and, with her other, pointed above to a light that was levitating, dangling by the black emptiness of space. My blue mind could not yet process what I was seeing (although a part of me thinks I always had), and before I could lift my jaw to form a smile, the light disappeared, shooting off into the void, leaving a trace of light behind it.

It wasn't until I asked my mother years later that I understood this memory was not fabricated in my young imaginative memory. It had happened. Looking back, it began to make sense that I have always questioned everything around me. I had deeper understandings at a young age that I could share without it seeming I was being braggadocio. Although, because of these thoughts, I always felt separate from the rest of society. My young mind could not understand (and still doesn't) why we could not just stop what we were doing in this world and concentrate on fixing all the problems we faced as a species. I was only about 7 when this thought occurred. My perception of reality could be drawn in on a much more myopic scale, directed towards my family dynamic. Why could we not "fix" all the problems we faced as a family? What was at the root of all this that was causing the flower not to blossom?

My father was an alcoholic. He was a meth user. Some people call him a functional one (or he was, at least; he now has passed on). My mother suffered from Manic bipolar disorder. They met in Los Angeles in the 1970s and worked at a hospital.

My father had come to Los Angeles to move closer to his father, Richard. Richard, my grandfather, had moved out to Los Angeles after escaping a marriage he never wanted to be in. He was a victim of the American Dream, the white picket fence, and the nuclear family. Richard had been a closet homosexual and had to hide the fact that he was gay from his family, his friends, his co-workers, and society. After the sex revolution of the 1960s, he began to explore his inner natural desires. Eventually, he felt comfortable leaving his wife after decades of marriage to find a community that would accept him as he was in West Hollywood.

I believe my father struggled with this fact. He was a victim of this distorted idea that the system lays before us, that there is an ideal representation of what it means to be human. This ideology corrupted his mind, and so did the Vietnam War. My father was a bit older than those who were drafted, but the adverse psychological effects were the same. He told me stories of drug use and the horror of seeing his friends being shot right in front of him. The system lied to him and the American people, but time has revealed they have lied from the beginning. He was alerted to this fact when he stepped off of a plane upon returning from war to a woman who spit in his face and yelled at him, "Baby Killer"!

He carried the scars of the war and returned to the United States, where protests flooded through the streets, and the people were condemning the government for its violence. The lady was not wrong. Implicitly, he was a "baby killer." He was a part of the system on a quest for dominance and power. Much like the blacks who fought in World War ll, people felt like fighting for their country gave them the "right" to be American and worthy. But much like those who fought for that reason found out, he was discarded and quickly forgotten by his government. The psychological and Post Traumatic Disorder that followed made it difficult for him to find work. And there wasn't much support from the government, if any. His dependency on booze and drugs exacerbated this. He would eventually meet my mother at a hospital where he was working, a woman who suffered from an unjust system in her own right.

My mother suffered from the racism that many civil rights leaders were fighting against in the 60's and 70's, but only by proximity. She was 2nd generation Italian, but my grandmother (Her mother) ended up with an African-American man and they moved to Lynwood, California, in the 1960s. Everywhere they went, she said, people would stare and point fingers. Her stepfather was also abusive and an alcoholic. He was a byproduct of the Jim Crow South and the intergenerational trauma of racism and slavery that had a significant impact on him. But his abuse eventually led my mother to run away.

The system wasn't concerned about what drove her to run away. Instead, they put her into the juvenile system, where she chose to stay for an entire year because she did not want to go back to the abuse. My mother wasn't a criminal and wasn't that type of WASP who wanted blacks to be treated as unequal, but she faced racial discrimination in juvenile hall from black inmates because she was white. I cannot imagine how this must have felt for her, and, at the same time, thinking about those who felt that they needed to react to her with violence because she represented the color of the system that was doing the same to them because of their skin color.

My mother, much like my father (and grandfather), was raised to hide their emotions and push them down deeply, essentially creating a ticking time bombThich Nhat Hanh, the global spiritual leader, said, "When people repress emotions like fear, grief, or anger instead of facing them with mindfulness, these emotions become internal "enemies" that drive destructive behavior." Society often encourages suppression—men are told to "be strong," people in marginalized communities are forced to hide pain, and individuals seeking authenticity may be pressured to conform. This repression leads to violence, addiction, self-destruction, and social alienation, as emotions unacknowledged often find expression in harmful ways. (Wisdom for Cooling the Flames or No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering, Thich Nhat Hanh 2001)

This observation by Thich Nhat Hanh permeated and rang true to my family through multiple generations from both sides of the family. My grandfather Richard was abusive to my grandmother Betty, in theory, because he had to live his life by the standards and expectations of a society that subjugates and suppresses in a very intentional and systematic way, to homogenize and mass produce these "ideal" American products to become soulless citizens who become desperate, drowning in the fray of competition that it creates to survive. This can be said for my mother's stepfather, James, my father, my mother, and many millions of Americans.

My parents were still chasing the American Dream when they met, and they continued to pursue this seemingly elusive desire presented to many Americans that if you worked hard enough, you would succeed. But looking back on their lives, I am not sure they ever did. These measurements of success often create suppressing emotions and denying our true selves; we contribute to cycles of violence and oppression, both personally and societally.

Socrates proclaimed that "an unexamined life is not worth living." For millions upon millions of people who believe they came into this world and ready with the perception that they are separate from the earth and reality, there is a disconnect. But as Alan Watts stated, "You didn't come into this world. You came out of it like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here." But how many Americans are still enslaved, shackled by these constraints, leading down a unidirectional course that only leads to a complete disconnection from their authentic selves?

The neoliberalism movements, born out of the counterculture and civil rights movements in the sixties, told them to ignore the suffering and chase material items and empty goals. This was all by design, of course, as Chomsky revealed in the film Requiem for the American Dream (2015). He explains that he did not anticipate the type of response from corporations and the government to challenge counterculture movements that questioned everything that the system led them to believe was valuable and important.

The documentary Requiem for the American Dream (2015) presents Noam Chomsky's analysis of wealth and power concentration in the U.S., detailing how economic and political elites have systematically dismantled democracy to serve their interests.

Chomsky argues that the American Dream—the idea that hard work leads to success—has been systematically undermined by a small group of economic elites working to shift wealth and power into their own hands. He outlines ten principles of wealth concentration, demonstrating how the system has been rigged against the working and middle classes. He discusses ten principles, some I will connect to my personal life.

The first principle would be how the government shapes ideology. Elites manufacture a belief system that discourages collective action (e.g., promoting individualism). This extended over to my family. An implicit burden placed upon them was that they were the cause of their own failures. It wasn't the government's fault that my father suffered from PTSD, alcoholism, and not being able to keep a job. This is how they responded to war veterans coming home.

In addition, the Civil Rights Movement and the struggles of Black Americans during that period often focused more on external issues, like legal rights, economic justice, and overcoming overt racism, rather than mental health. The systemic neglect of Black mental health led to many coping mechanisms, often rooted in survival rather than healing.

The repression of my mother's suffering and ultimate battle with mental illness was not due to a chemical imbalance but because there was inadequate treatment and an open discussion about expressing her trauma in the community. There has always been stigmatization that was held in the black community that she was raised in, that dealing with your emotions and expressing them was a sign of weakness. The black culture, in general, has been disproportionately untreated in the mental health field, especially during the '60s, '70s, and '80s. In addition, the Civil Rights Movement and the struggles of Black Americans (my mother's family and her environment) during that period often focused more on external issues, like legal rights, economic justice, and overcoming overt racism rather than mental health. The systemic neglect of Black mental health led to many coping mechanisms, often rooted in survival rather than healing.

My mother and father had three kids. The odds of this intergenerational trauma being passed down were very probable. My older brother Brian had a fraternal twin named Eric, who died from SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). I was born 4 years later. My parents never examined their own lives, and so all the trauma they had held implicitly and explicitly came along on the journey of our upbringing.

My mother and father divorced when I was nine years old, after years of back-and-forth separation. I was abandoned often, let with my mother who was suffering from mental illness. I do not recall one incident of intervention from schools or any authority. We were on a lower socioeconomic scale, so I feel we did not get much help in our community. This led me to depression at a young age. After my parents divorced (my mother attempted suicide upon hearing the news of the divorce), my brother began his path into the justice system. I would spend a few years lost in my own life, but would eventually find myself joining a gang, doing drugs, and eventually going to prison at the age of 17 years old.

I understood early on in the process that the system was not concerned with rehabilitation. My brother, who spent most of his life incarcerated, was not meant to be. The prison industrial complex was designed to take people from poor neighborhoods, many of them black and brown, and use them as modern slave labor. In the documentary Requiem for the American Dream (2015), Noam Chomsky critiques the U.S. prison system as part of a broader discussion on wealth inequality and systemic control. He argues that mass incarceration, particularly from the 1970s onward, has been used as a tool to control marginalized populations—mainly Black and poor communities—while protecting the interests of the wealthy elite.

Chomsky ties the rise of mass incarceration to economic shifts, noting that as neoliberal policies eroded social safety nets and unions, the state turned to punitive measures to manage the resulting social instability. The so-called "War on Drugs" disproportionately targeted Black communities, criminalizing poverty and social unrest rather than addressing root causes like economic inequality and systemic racism.

Essentially, the prison-industrial complex is an extension of elite power designed to suppress dissent and maintain a system that benefits the wealthy while punishing those who are economically and socially disadvantaged. We can connect this to broader historical patterns of social control, where marginalized groups are criminalized to sustain the status quo.

This process of belief is systematic and intentional. Society creates wars, creates division, and exacerbates poverty and suffering by never addressing what is causing it. Much like the pharmaceutical companies, who only offer medication for the disorder, instead of trying to figure out what is causing the disorder, the system does the same to those in prison.

A person who is incarcerated can go their entire sentence without stepping into a classroom, a program, or anything that would be deemed rehabilitative. The structure of prison allows an inmate to design their life in a way that they become conditioned to not having any responsibility or accountability. In addition, when a youth offender goes into the system for a minor criminal act, they are statistically more likely to adopt more dangerous criminal behaviors. The measures are not to prevent but to punish a person who is already most likely suffering from trauma and is of a lower socioeconomic status.

The school-to-prison pipeline is the most alarming representation of this problem in America. The school-to-prison pipeline is not accidental—it's a deliberate function of a system designed to maintain control over marginalized groups. By starving schools of resources while expanding the prison system, the government ensures that poverty and racial inequality remain entrenched, making it harder for the oppressed to challenge the elite.

I began to challenge the system when I was in prison. I was on the verge of committing acts to place me in the hierarchy of a prison gang when I was introduced to punk rock music. This rearranged and challenged everything I had learned in my personal life and the system itself. I was able to place a mirror up to prison, and it reflected society in such a similar way that it was jarring and caused me to have a mental breakdown. All the illusions came crumbling down, shattered into a million tiny pieces, jagged and profane.

In that cell, at that moment, I saw my father, bloody and bruised, draped in red, white, and blue, isolated and alone. My mother was ravished by the cold and disconnected from herself, disjointed, a fragmented image of the child she used to be. Her cries are never able to scream. No one was ever there to hear them anyway. My grandfathers were never allowed to be who they were meant to be.

As I write this, my brother is in a prison cell, 22 years behind concrete walls. I am sitting in a lounge room at UCSD, a top-tier University, reflecting on what leads people in their lives. When I look at my family, I see pain and suffering. I see them trying to survive, living from paycheck to paycheck. I see them behind prison walls. I see them facing racism. I see them chasing an elusive idea of what it means to be human. Always without reach because what they were chasing was never what they wanted but something that the system created for them to find meaning in.

When I was younger, I always felt that there was something bigger out there. Maybe it was because of my first memory of seeing a light in the night sky that left a trace of light behind it, disappearing into the emptiness of space. It never faded from my memory.

When I see ads on the screen or see the division among our population, there is something beyond what I am directed to be concerned about or to care for. There is something beyond our scope, and that is the answer. It isn't found in the color of someone's skin tone. It isn't a like or a subscribe. It isn't in a shiny new toy. The answer is within us all. It's already there; it always has been. It's the curiosity of that young boy looking at something he had no answer for. It was the touch of his mother that guided his hand to point at the night sky. It was the relief on my grandfather's shoulders when he finally came out of the closet and put down the mask he had been wearing his entire 50-something years on this planet.

The answer came to me inside my cell when I decided to put down my mask. The American Dream, like love, is an illusion—woven into the fabric of a society designed to suppress, control, and deceive. Generations of trauma, masked behind ideals of success and belonging, reveal a system built on power and exploitation rather than truth and humanity. Yet, there lies a chance for awakening in confronting this reality—whether through personal suffering, loss, or deep introspection. The answer isn't in the world's false promises but in the courage to face oneself, strip away the masks, and seek something real beyond the constructs imposed upon us.