(SANTIAGO, Chile) Travel can have the most unfortunate impact on one’s discretion in taking pictures.  Concrete stairs, painted walls and bleak hillsides suddenly become objects of our affection and make an impression as though each were a line penned by Neruda or the site of a presidential suicide.

The power of a place is oftentimes unspeakable, not only for the events to which it has played host, but for its ability to align and make meaning of once murky ideas, concepts and stories.

The critical events that define the Chile of today were, for me, disassembled amongst the detritus of an education that placed too much emphasis on content and too little on context. However, guided through Santiago by our humble host, Ivan, the names of Allende and Pinochet, along with my primitive understanding of how American influence operates abroad, snapped into a coherent narrative – a narrative that informed not only what I was seeing, but my understanding of my own country.

The narrative depicts a Chile with an acute self-awareness. It declares the free-market doesn’t always create the best living conditions and that without a central government capable of channeling and redirecting market forces, the possibility of having a healthy functioning society quickly approaches zero.

It raises the question – how do people live in the midst of such a system? How is it tolerated and what do people do to survive it, or change it? In Chile, the narrative continues to be written in real time. We see it written in when we pass schools with chairs and desks hanging from the fences. We see it written in the Universidad by professors and graduate students, our Chilean counterparts, who dedicate their lives to fighting the inequality and the opportunity gap that slightly diminishes many of the problems we, as Americans, face at home. We see it in a 120-acre private school that provides a shelter for many of the wealthy who seemingly would rather avoid the unconscionable daily realities of a society they’ve helped create.

The conservative and liberal viewpoints in Chile are no different than they are in America. The right wants a hands-off approach where the market gets to dictate who wins and loses. The left wants more centralized control because it believes the free-market view is predicated upon too many middle-class assumptions about human capacity and opportunity.

When a government comes into power, they create a design – laws, mandates, policies – that comprise the political architecture of their idea of a nation. Then, the people get to operate within the walls of this design.

The left aims to build on a single-level with wide doorways, while the right builds high-rises without elevators and only a very narrow stairwell. But what we sometimes forget, is that the longer a government stays in power, the more time they have to make the architecture evermore consistent with their ideology. And when an oppressive dictator, such as Pinochet, is in power for 17 years, the systemic problems cannot simply be corrected with a couple terms of a left leaning government who’s going to do things by the book.

22 years since the dictatorship was voted out of power, quality education is still the domain of the elite that requires students to be from wealth, or have to attend substandard schools and go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

Oddly, it looks a great deal more like education in the USA. And it begs the question: Why is an issue that causes protests in Chile, just accepted by so many Americans?

Benjamin Franklin once quipped that poor Americans don’t see themselves as poor – but as millionaires who are temporarily down on their luck. Observations of so many middle-class Americans, who are continually duped into voting against their own interests, could only be explained by this sort of delusion.

We have become afraid of creating laws to make our society more equal, because one day, when we’re rich, we don’t want to have to deal with them. We just wait, sedated and distracted, for that pay day to come and spend our lives denying our true identity in belief that one day it will all have been worth it. But time only seems to exacerbate the problem, making the chance of building wealth more elusive with each acquiescence of a tuition rise, each acceptance of a middle-class tax, each creation of an off-shore tax haven that strips funding for public infrastructure, each H1 b worker visa that replaces an American worker, all in service of a fantasy that never materializes.

Chileans are not so easily tricked into this. They fight back. They protest. They march. We watch American Idol thinking the next winner might be us. Perhaps its time for us to stop talking about the American dream – and start talking about the American reality.