My American Dream
The store was busy, the check out lines long. I was half-heartedly leafing through a small recipe booklet about slow cooking … you know, the little booklets displayed next to the candy bars. A voice interrupted my inspection of a recipe that uses root beer and pork shoulder.
“I don’t know how young people can make it now-a-days. They have so much debt … it’s like the American Dream is dead.”
My head swiveled to see the owner of that comment behind me, a well-dressed gal chatting over loaded shopping carts with another person in the queue.
She continued. “It’s like we’re going backwards. My grandchildren won’t be able to sustain a lifestyle even on a par with ours. What good is a costly education when you can’t afford a decent house?”
She then went on to blame just about everyone from both political parties and several religious groups.
Oh, my. I could barely contain myself, but I did. You can’t really teach someone much while standing in line at the check out. What could I say?
Expect the worst, but hope for the best…watchwords of life? Brought up in a household that was beset by illness from the time I was very young, the worse was always present. My sister contracted polio, my Dad was sent away to a TB sanatorium, we all had what were then expected childhood diseases…mumps, measles, chicken pox…even the dreaded German Measles…mostly all at the same time. Money was exceptionally tight. We had few possessions. We had the basics and nothing more.
Despite all of this and much more, there was always the magnificent sense that things would get better; there was hope. Probably the most important generator of that sentiment was the desire to learn new things. If you think about it, there are countless worlds of knowledge waiting for you to enter, perhaps through books, through experience, through direct education…countless ways to rekindle the spark of hope that lies within delight and knowledge. Even in a household where there were few books, books being costly items that had to compete with food and new shoes, there was always the idea that if we wanted to, we could learn anything.
The library was four blocks away. Books were there for the borrowing and they could open doors and windows and highways and sea voyages whenever we wished. Heroes and heroines lived in those books, boys and girls without means who triumphed despite the limitations of their childhoods. There was the school, six blocks in the other direction, where, if we were attentive and responsible, we could get the tools to accumulate untold mountains of knowledge, knowledge, which my father seriously told us, “No one can take it away from you.” No one was going to give us anything. We knew that we were the prime actors, the producers and directors of our lives. We knew that we were the prime actors, the producers and directors of our lives.
We believed that we were entitled to learn whatever and whenever we could. We believed that we were entitled to follow our curiosity, entitled to get as much as we could from every educational opportunity that came our way. We were entitled to work hard for the rewards of that education.Those entitlements are somehow different from what we often see as the perception of what education, especially formal education … read school … is about today.
I’ve often heard parents complain about all of the pressures on children of today. They are expected to do well in school, be involved in extra-curricular activities, give back through volunteering, have a wide circle of friends, etc, etc. I don’t know where these parents grew up, but those were the same pressures on us as we grew up…without the questionable benefit of electronics. The most electronic thing that we had in our house was a TV that received three channels which could be changed by getting up and turning the dial on the set.
We expected that we would be armed to survive at least as well as our parents, but we never expected that we would surpass them economically. Perhaps, with a good education we might be able to garner more secure employment at a higher wage, but I can’t ever recall dreaming of living in a McMansion…a cottage with a white picket fence, as smarmy as it seems, yes. Or even a nice apartment. I would not say that we counted success as living better than our parents.
I did dream of having things we didn’t have…like a stapler, paper clips, a gas stove, dry cleaning when needed. All along the way, we practiced the thrift that came from having so little growing up and it held us in good stead.
But, and this is a big but, I wonder if we didn’t short change our children by making their growing up easier in some ways than ours. They never had to worry about having school supplies, appropriate clothing, money for class trips and all of those little extras that smooth the growing up years. We did try to teach them thrift by precept and example, though I don’t think wearing the same coat for ten years did much for their understanding. They probably thought I had less than good fashion sense. I watch from this place in time as they navigate the difference between income and life lessons and, so far, so good.
The American Dream is not one of accumulation, though from what I heard on that check out line and what I’ve read, it does seem to be a criteria to measure success for some. The American Dream is the one I dreamt, the one where, if I work hard I can develop the talents that I may have, that I can become better at whatever I choose to be better at. For those that equate that better in terms of bling and excess, there may be a problem. While that dream may spawn the development of rows of storage facilities across the landscape to hold some of the accumulated successes, it says volumes about the stagnation of purpose that goal creates. Bigger houses, bigger cars, walk-in closets on-suite bathrooms measure what?
San Gimingano, a hill town in Tuscany, lends a lesson along these lines. From the highway, the town looms up from the fields of sunflowers notably because of its many tall towers, each built by a wealthy merchant to demonstrate his fiscal prowess. They serve no other purpose other than the competition to show who had more money.
I’m thinking about the kinds of towers we built to demonstrate who we are and whether they are hallmarks of the American Dream or something else. Gigantic houses and expansive living are not wrong; as the focus of life’s effort, as a way to outdo our parents they describe hollow aspirations…that is not the dream I dreamt or still dream.
