How is "every man for himself" a nation?

I am reading Henry Giroux's "Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability." In its specifics, it is a brutal examination of how the Bush Administration's policies were, in practice, a "biopolitics of disposability", in which certain groups - specifically the poor, brown, and black - are regarded by the government as disposable in that they are simply not worth protecting. And because they are not invited or allowed to speak for themselves - when was the last time you saw a poor African-American woman invited to speak about economic policy on CNN*? - they are rendered invisible, and a narrative about them is created by other people, more powerful people, who have an economic incentive to keep them invisible and frame them as lazy, incompetent and living off hard-working taxpayers. Because if you can see for yourself that there are helpless poor people being buried and drowned by a natural disaster, you might want some of your tax dollars to go towards helping to stop that, rather than your tax dollars going towards military spending that is 20 TIMES what any other country spends. Or, you might want some of that money simply re-directed - for example, some of the money we, the taxpayers, spend on homeland security re-directed towards securing homes in New Orleans rather than wire-tapping private citizens. Just some. Just enough to make a difference. Because despite what occasionally feels like all evidence to the contrary, I genuinely believe Americans want to make a difference. But if we can't see a difference needs to be made somewhere, we won't feel the need to fight for it, and before Hurricane Katrina made undeniable hardship and poverty in our own backyard visible to us and the rest of the world, I would say that I, at least, wasn't really aware of just how badly a difference needed to be made.

In the generalities, what Giroux is examining is how "neoliberal" (NOT to be confused with liberal, thanks) policies are undermining what I would term a "level-playing field." "Fairness" in the sense of "everyone should have access to equal education and health care" is replaced with "fairness" in the sense of "I worked for my money, I earned it, why should I have to share it?" "Nationalism" in the sense of "we are all Americans and must support and better one another" is replaced with "Nationalism" in the sense of "support our troops, while they are at war" (they often become a subject of this biopolitics of disposability when they return).

So this brings me to my point: how is "every man for himself" a nation? How are we Americans when our primary argument is that we should, as individuals, achieve, and we should, as individuals, benefit? I'm a staunch capitalist, but I'm also a nationalist. I believe in the American dream. I believe in the dream that individuals can achieve for themselves and their families. But that dream has been distorted. To achieve for yourself, you must step on to a level playing field with other players and see who hits the hardest. You cannot step onto a field wearing a t-shirt and shorts and face an opponent wearing padding and a helmet and call that fair. In the instance of, say, children who lived through Katrina in New Orleans facing someone from my hometown in Massachusetts when vying to get into college or get a job, it is, frankly, a lot more like a skinny kid walking onto a field by him or herself to face a bigger, better-fed opponent wearing pads, surrounded by friends, and holding a hammer.

I would be, in this scenario, the kid with the hammer. But I can't see my opponent. I don't know that as I fight tooth and nail for a job in an economy where those are becoming ever-scarcer that I am swinging at a kid half my size without any of my advantages. The opponents I actually see look just like me, and I know that I am going to beat them because I am better, because no matter what school they went to or what experience they have, I will work harder. The position in life I was born into gave me, as it were, a "fighting chance" at the American dream. But if tomorrow I lost my ability to walk in a car accident, I could just as easily become disposable. Unable to get places easily without help, I would become a burden on my family and friends. Unable to navigate easily, I might be late for interviews and lose out to someone who had the decency to show up on time. Looking for support from the government, something for those taxes I paid back when I could contribute, I would find that resources for people like me have been slashed, and the bus that used to run a few times a day to give someone like me a sense of independence and a chance to move around and gain access to things that I need, like work, no longer runs due to economic constraints - sorry.

We should believe in a national identity in which we are all Americans and we all deserve a level playing field because it is right. But if that isn't enough incentive, believe in it because there but for the grace go us all - and in our current unstable times and economy, there are fewer and fewer of us with the necessary safety nets at our personal disposal.

*The rarity of seeing ANY African-American woman on CNN not withstanding**...
**Although there's quite a bit of talk on CNN right now, actually, about being Black, due to that special time of the year, the time when they air the "Black in America" special, about which @Sistertoldja has quite a lot to say on Twitter, if you want to check her out - she links to her blog.