I had a very similar experience a few years ago with a kid I did volunteer work with. I had to go by the kid's apartment. We normally only saw these kids at their school, which is in a crappy neighborhood. This kid was living like a roach, but there was a kick-ash TV set in the apartment. And I had the same response you did.
I ended up talking to a lot of kids and teachers at the school (just subtly feeling things out, because it bothered me), and I figured out that it is symptomatic of poverty in the United States for the last 30 years, at least. There is a segment of the population that is poor, but they are constantly bombarded with the message that the American dream is to own the big-screen TV or the gaming system or the nice rims or the designer clothes. And that becomes the end game. Instead of it being, "I am going to climb the ladder," a kind of hopelessness has set in and they settle for a trapping or two of wealth, which is much easier. A big TV set says, "You've made it!".
My grandmother on my mom's side came over to the U.S. as an immigrant in the 1910s. She was 15 and came here alone. She left her whole family behind. Didn't speak a word of English. Her husband died when my mom was 7, so my grandmother, who was uneducated, raised two kids alone working in sweatshops. Both of her kids went to college and onto more affluent lives. That was the end game for them.
Something my uncle once said about his upbringing stuck with me. He said, "When your mom and I were kids, we were poor. But we didn't know we were poor."
I think that sort of crystallizes what has changed. It's subtle, but it's a fundamental shift in values (attributable to many factors). I do think it is a credit to my grandmother, but it's more than that. They were living in a more closed environment, at a time when people's worlds often didn't extend much farther than their neighborhoods. They weren't being hit with 1,000 messages a day selling the big-screen TV as the American dream. Their neighbors didn't have toys either, so there wasn't an envy syndrome. They knew there was a more affluent life out there, but if there was food on the table, it was a good day, and they didn't think of themselves as poor.
As a result, they were better able to focus on a purer version of the American dream: get an education, climb the ladder, etc. In some ways, it's the difference between hopelessness and hope.
