We Are The Stories We Tell
America is prosperous. People want to come here for many reasons, and economic opportunity is at the top of that list. For those who live here, abundance is an expected baseline. Naturally, Americans still complain about financial problems, often forgetting that these are "rich people's problems." It is an extraordinary achievement for a country that someone just by living here can automatically be in the top 1% of the world. With only 5% of the world's population, the US generates an astonishing 24% of the world's Gross Domestic Product. The American success story is a tapestry of many threads weaved together to create one of the wealthiest countries on earth.
The threads of favorable geography, lots of land, and ample mineral and agricultural resources are not enough to explain American prosperity. Plenty of countries have similar advantages and no prosperity for the average person to show for it. We are the stories we tell. Americans created a story of who they are as a nation. A land of free markets, industrial strength, technological advances, and exceptional education, fueled by an ethos that promotes hard work, innovation, and boundless optimism. The stories that shaped America celebrate those who aspire to greatness regardless of their starting point. I am optimistic about America because stories are hard to kill, no matter how much some people try to do so.
While intense and complex, our immigration debates are a good problem to have, regardless of the proposed solutions. We are a land of immigrants trying to not be overwhelmed by the sheer number of new immigrants. We are looking for ways to have fewer people come in when others look for ways to prevent them from leaving. The fair criticism of greed and arrogance does little to dampen the enthusiasm of those of us who immigrated and know the harsh realities in our home countries pale compared to the downsides of living in America. Our stories strengthen the American Story.
What Normalized Poverty Looks Like
Humans are built for survival; our resilient brains adapt to poverty and prosperity, creating a familiar normal. Adapting to scarcity trains us to make the most of scarcity without really questioning why the scarcity is there in the first place. I’ve seen this phenomenon all over the world. In America, working with the disadvantaged in places like Philadelphia and Los Angeles, poverty is just a few blocks away from luxury. I’ve seen it in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, the slums of San Pedro Sula in Honduras, the settlements of Guatemala City, and poor barrios in Mexico City.
I have personally experienced normalized poverty growing up in four countries on three continents. It felt normal to live in a communal apartment in Soviet Russia at age six. We didn’t feel poor because everyone was poor. We shared this apartment with an elderly couple who had one room for the two of them, while we shared two rooms for our family of four. As humble as our circumstances were at the time, we were about to experience an improvement in our fortunes and a level of poverty around us that can only be witnessed in the poorest countries on earth.
My father was invited to work in Mozambique, where we felt rich living in a duplex and driving a company car provided to foreign professionals by the government. After its independence from the Portuguese, Mozambique was run by a newly established Marxist government. Already one of the poorest countries in the world, the economy screeched to a halt when most of the white Portuguese who ran the country left. Marxists tended to nationalize whole industries. Nationalizing is another word for forcefully taking private property and putting it into the hands of bureaucrats who would then proceed to run into the ground. These large companies now belonged to “the people,” which is another word for belonging to no one. By the way, that duplex we lived in had also been taken from some family, who had to start over somewhere else just like us.
My father, an engineer, was hired to help rebuild a newly nationalized transportation company with a large fleet of refrigerator trucks. When he got off the plane, the newly appointed head of the company took him to see the large operation. When my father asked where all the people were, the man answered, “Oh, it’s just you, me, and the secretary. We have to start this from the ground up.”
Our relatively stable situation was that only compared to over half of the population living on under a dollar a day. We had regular bombings in the city. A year into our life there, a devastating civil war started in the north. It lasted five years, costing a small country 1.5 million lives. With food, things were strange. We raised our own chicken and could get fresh fruit, vegetables, and fish at a local market, but we received food ration cards for things like bread and rice. All consumer goods had to be purchased abroad. I recently asked my dad why I didn’t remember ever going to clothing stores. He told me this was because there were none.
Let me repeat this. The capital city had no clothing, consumer electronics, appliances, or even bookstores. We purchased books at a book fair that happened once a year. We didn't own a TV set for the first few years because there was no television station. Eventually, we got a TV set and a massive antenna that caught a faint signal from South Africa. Compared to most Mozambicans, we had it good. Life outside the provincial towns in rural Mozambique looked exactly as it did a thousand or ten thousand years ago. Straw huts, dirt floors, and subsistence farming.
We were part of a tiny expatriate community of Chilean exiles who came from all over to help rebuild a country. My mom taught nursing in medical school and later started kindergarten from the ground up. Others ran gold and silver mines, commercial fisheries, and agricultural projects and taught at the local university. My love for music was born singing in a Chilean children's choir. It revealed I had a natural singing voice, and my music teacher started to give me solo parts in some of the songs. We once performed for the first Mozambican president, Samora Machel. He was a charismatic man with a winsome smile. He wore the signature Marxist rebel fighter military fatigues that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara popularized. Samora took time to talk to us after the performance. Years later, he died in a mysterious plane crash over South Africa. It was suspected that the adversarial Apartheid South African regime was behind the crash.
Western prosperity was received by us in tiny doses as a weak signal from a distant planet. We watched shows about life in America as images of a parallel reality we would never experience; driving cars in high school, cruise ships with smiling well, well-dressed people drinking fancy cocktails, futuristic high-rises, beautiful shopping centers, and manicured neighborhoods.
I don't think we asked ourselves. If the people on the screen were like us, why did they have such different lives?
De-Normalizing Poverty
To bridge that gap of this glaring cognitive dissonance, we were told a story. The glimpses of this other life we saw through a weak TV signal were of societies based on an evil and exploitative capitalist system. We were told that capitalism would very soon give way to a just and equitable socialism, a life based on dignity, equality, and prosperity for all people, not just a select few. The problem was that this bright future didn’t seem to be coming any time soon. It was impossible to ignore that the select few in collectivist countries were the only ones with any upward mobility, and the “exploited masses” in the West looked pretty well off. Evenings watching grainy TV images of American life stuck with me. I didn’t buy the story and carried this rebellious spirit into college. I was later told people called me capitalist behind my back in college, and it was meant as an insult.
De-normalizing poverty is gradual, painful, and healing. We can slowly transition from a mindset of scarcity to one of abundance. It’s not easy for anyone to do on a personal level, and the best way to accelerate that is full immersion in an environment of abundance. It creates a culture shock initially followed by adapting to what is possible as a new normal.
My first real culture shock came after I married Deb, an American, and we came to visit my wife’s parents for the Christmas holidays. I had been in the US many times, but only a few days at a time. Deb wanted to get something for our dog Mocha and took me to PetCo. I knew it was a pet store, but something came over me when I realized how huge that place was. I actually had an anxiety attack and had to leave the store. Deb followed me into the parking lot, puzzled by my behavior.
I was angry. "You have a supermarket for pets? Do you realize millions have nothing, and you have supermarkets for pets?" Deb nodded, empathizing. "Yep, there are several large chains all over the country. I'm sorry." I now happily go to PetCo all the time and experience zero anxiety.
Years later, we had already moved to the US. Deb took the family to the town where she grew up - Horicon, Wisconsin, population 3,500. Most people in Wisconsin don't know where Horicon is. Deb showed us around town, and we toured her high school. She was surprised to see me in awe of a town she couldn't wait to escape as a teenager. I was actually moved to tears of gratitude for a country that created prosperity on this level. This place in the middle of nowhere had good roads, beautiful houses, and a high school, which I could only see in movies growing up. These were ordinary people living on a level unfathomable to most people in the world.
In 1989, years before the election campaign I was part of, before becoming Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin visited the US as a newly elected member of the Soviet Parliament. He made an unscheduled stop at a Randall's grocery store in Houston, TX. He was overwhelmed by the abundance he saw, remarking that even the Politburo and Mikhail Gorbachev did not have that. At first, he suspected this was a staged experience. After learning every American has access to what he saw, he was reportedly deeply distraught. A simple visit to a grocery store in the US contributed to market reforms, which he introduced as President of Russia. He later wrote:
"When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons, and goods of every possible sort, for the first time, I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people."
Normalizing Abundance
Orlando Hernández is a Cuban baseball player who helped Cuba get an Olympic gold medal in 1992. His government banned him from playing baseball to keep him from defecting to the US. An elite athlete, he was smeared in the press and limited to working as an assistant in a psych ward. At the peak of his athletic career in Cuba, he was paid $105 a year.
Orlando fled Cuba by boat, was signed by the New York Yankees to a $6 million contract for four years, and helped them win three consecutive world titles (1998-2000). As a major league player and millionaire, Orlando was reportedly so worried at a celebration party they would run out of beer as they often did in Cuba, the patrons had to reassure him by showing a fully stocked storage room.
An environment of abundance creates a culture of abundance, which, in turn, creates more abundance. We live in an age where an average person in the West has a higher standard of living than the European royalty had just two hundred years ago. Celebrating and improving on this while caring for the disadvantaged seems only logical, except the obvious is not as obvious when the stories we tell ourselves in America resemble those I was told growing up. The stories we hear of the oppressed and the oppressors with crudely reassigned roles of victims and villains to fit the American cultural context are fanned into flame by Social Media, creating a concerning parallel reality. For the first time in history, the approval ratings of American presidents are not correlated with the American people's prosperity levels. Highjacked by distorted stories, Americans may eventually vote their way out of prosperity. I'm writing this book to contribute a more optimistic and grateful story of the tapestry of abundance in America.
"The wealth of America isn't an inventory of goods; it's an organic, living entity, a fragile, pulsing fabric of ideas, expectations, loyalties, moral commitments, and people." - David Brooks
"The real source of wealth and capital in this new era is not material things... it is the human mind, the human spirit, the human imagination, and our faith in the future." - Steve Forbes, business magnate
"America is not just a country, it's an idea, a concept. It's the land where dreams come true, where hard work and creativity are rewarded." - Paulo Coelho, author
"America's wealth is not just in its material resources but in its diversity, innovation, and freedom of expression." - Maya Angelou, poet
"America's greatness is not just in its economic power but in its commitment to justice, equality, and opportunity for all." - Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid revolutionary
"America's cultural richness and diversity are sources of wealth that transcend material possessions." - Yo-Yo Ma, cellist
"The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement." - James Truslow Adams
"America is a country of abundance. If you're willing to put in the effort, there's no limit to what you can achieve." - Tony Robbins
"America is the land of plenty. We have an abundance of resources, opportunities, and freedoms that are the envy of the world." - Warren Buffett
"America is the land of abundance, where hard work and determination can lead to unlimited success." - Bill Gates
"The American Dream is not just about financial success; it's about living a fulfilling life and making a positive impact on others." - Sheryl Sandberg