April 18, 2009

What is the American Dream?



Travel to distant lands?


Or living in wide open places?



Or your own hometown?
M

1 comment:

Bob said...

Perhaps it's easiest to say that I don't know what my American Dream is, because it changes with me. I have been called closed minded in the past, but I dream of an America where people judge each other on their own merits and abilities and not upon arbitrary societal labels that have nothing to do with the heart of a person. I dream of a comfortable life but know that money causes more problems than it solves. I wish Americans were more literate than they are, to realize that Thoreau was not a crank living at the edge of the village but a man searching for his soul and the soul of his country. I wish that rampant consumerism wasn't the outer symbol of an inner soul, even if I do plug in my iPod and thereby at times make the world go away, a musical cone of silence.

What is my American Dream? Maybe I've already found it. I have a spouse who loves me for who I am. I have friends, people who care for each other and stand to the task at hand when needed, yet gather to laugh and live and celebrate. I have beauty, not just in nature and literacy and art, but in the stolen moments of kindness, of acts done "anonymously" as well as in the spring flower growing through the crack in the sidewalk. I have hyperbole to sling like hash. Life is ebb and flow, pain and beauty in balance. Maybe my American Dream is simply to appreciate what I have and to know that as life changes, sharing those changes with people you love makes life sweetest.