american-dream

Was 9/11 not the 20th congress of the American Dream?

I was once driven north along Central Park, all the way from Chinatown. We hailed the cab in front of a building where Orthodox Jews still lived, so they shut down an elevator on Saturdays. In the taxi, I was with my mother. We were visiting her aunt, my great aunt, who was 93. She had no memory of the old country, Lithuania, but she'd been born there. Her parents escaped the pogroms so she could survived a century here. Her American prosperity was half a century of subsistence wages and thirty years of Medicare in an elevator building. The old country for the cab driver was Bangladesh, and he was a talker. He'd just graduated from college, and his prospects were good. He'd majored in a practical field, network engineering or something like that. Young and optimistic, he spoke fluent English. His big idea was to keep his countrymen out of the United States. America was great, but if he got overrun with foreigners, his kind in particular, it would be ruined. "Bangladesh is hot and crowded. Why would want to make America like that." He said this in all sincerity.

One of the things, though, that has always afflicted the American reality and the American vision is this aversion to history. History is not something you read about in a book, history is not even the past__t__ the present. Because everybody operates, whether or not we know it, out of assumptions which are produced and produced only by our history. Now the history of this country is not bloodier than other countries, but it__ bloody. It is not more criminal than that of other countries, but it__ criminal. Or in short, it__ not worse than the history of France or England or any country we can name__ut it__ different.

Whether you attribute it to some mysterious triple package or to your own Horatio Alger story, to succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America__hich means that at some level you__e made peace with its rather ugly past.

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I__ his ideal.

Denying the popular vote is un-American and anti-democratic.

The way of the consumerist culture is to spend so much energy chasing happiness that it has none left to be happy.

In my heart, I am American, and I believe I have a free will and can take charge of my own destiny.

The streets of America may not have been paved with gold, but they were cobbled in middle-class dreams.

Those were comfortable, carefree years. The word I__ use now is idyllic. On Friday nights, we cheered on the Bulldogs of Midland High. On Sunday mornings, we went to church. Nobody locked their doors. Years later, when I would speak about the American Dream, it was Midland I had in mind.

We cordially believe in the rights of property. We think that normally and in the long run the rights of humanity, coincide with the rights of property... But we feel that if in exceptional cases there is any conflict between the rights of property and the rights of man, then we must stand for the rights of man.

And in the end, we were all just humans, drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.

Kill the body and the head will die.

The American dream is what has kept Americans from rebelling against corporate corruption.Now that 2/3 of us know it's dead, expect anything.

America isn't breaking apart at the seams. The American dream isn't dying. Our new racial and ethnic complexion hasn't triggered massive outbreaks of intolerance. Our generations aren't at each other's throats. They're living more interdependently than at any time in recent memory, because that turns out to be a good coping strategy in hard times. Our nation faces huge challenges, no doubt. So do the rest of the world's aging economic powers. If you had to pick a nation with the right stuff to ride out the coming demographic storm, you'd be crazy not to choose America, warts and all.

It's because of my grandfather that I became a Young Avenger. But it's hard sometimes, to be a black kid carrying a name like "Patriot". I remember talking to Captain America about before he died, and he explained what Patriotism meant to him...It wasn't about blindly supporting your government. It was about knowing what your country could be, what it should be... And trying to lead it there through your example. And holding it accountable when it failed. I remember he said: "There's noting patriotic about corruption or cover-ups... or defending them. But exposing them, well, that takes a hero.

...all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust