Who am I to live lavishly?
Who am I to have what I want, do what I want, say what I want?
Who am I to do what I love with my life?
Who am I to get everything I’ve ever wanted?
Pessimism. Doubt. Self-deprecation. Ignorance.
It all leads to finding something to blame.
Besides ourselves.
…
It’s interesting.
As we live our lives, and attempt to direct it the way that we want to, we build a case against what is wrong and a case for what is right in our lives.
This shit has been a lot harder than I thought it was.
I thought I could just go to the dream store, rummage through the aisles of arts, and lifestyles, and meanings and pick out the one that was perfect. The one just for me.
But it hasn’t been like that.
I’ve chosen a baker’s dozen by now.
I picked up a dream, took it to the counter, paid the beautiful, dreamy checkout girl (dreamy…get it? He-he.), then went home with my purchase, thinking that from then on my life would be amazing.
Full of love, full of determination, full of structure, clarity, romance and people I couldn’t stand to be without.
But, I’ve stashed a lot of dreams in my now very cluttered garage of ‘has-beens’.
And it’s made me resentful.
But it’s not the country’s fault. It’s provided me with the foundation to do anything.
It’s my fault describing the world in a way that blames it for a purchase that I made.
…
The American Dream is not really a definition.
It was and always will be…an idea.
Something to define for ourselves.
Maybe it’s impossible for me to really conceptualize what the ‘American Dream’ looked like when colonialism was banished and a Republican freedom was put in its place.
So…that means I’ve been unfair.
Maybe back then, the American Dream was everything anyone actually wanted. Everyone could see it. Everyone was after it.
Maybe then dreams went only as far as individual rights, fair trial, innocent until proven guilty, freedom to pray to any god you want, vote freely, speak your mind in order to contribute to the future of a new and limitless country — because that was the definition of a dream beyond the horrible horribleness that came before.
Maybe that American Dream was very real.
…
I’ve been horribly ignorant until now about the differences between today and 200 years ago. Hell, the progression and complexity of a dream has forever changed. It’s moved forward. But only because no matter what happened, people committed to the idea of a dream:
- Industrialization of the 1800s
- Civil War fought for slavery abolishment
- the expansion of transportation: planes, trains, and automobiles
- the Great Depression
- Civil rights pressed by MLK
- Women’s Rights movement of the 1970s
- The War on Terror after 9/11
They were all different stages. All of them meaning something to the people that were enduring them and acting on them.
…
The American Dream isn’t dead.
It’s us that have died.
We’ve just concreted it into what we may have assumed it was. Which far too tightly attached to an older idea of a different time.
Maybe I’ve defined it so easily, that not only do I discredit its long history, but I limit my very own dreams because of it.
What is the American Dream today, optimistically?
The problem is that even though we still have all the freedoms — and more — than we did as a country 200 years ago, we’ve lost patriotism.
And I think that comes from our inability to have great things to aspire to. We’re too distracted by nonsense, too intoxicated by convenience and sedentary lives, and spoiled by the dissolving of the communal reality:
We’re all Americans. We’re in this together. And we’ve taken our freedom to do whatever we want for granted.
…
The American Dream is us.
It’s our conscious awareness of what we have and have had, our freedoms and liberties.
The American dream — though I described it like this, like many do — is not the big house, the two cars, the full family, the white-picket fence.
There may have been a time when that was it, but we’re beyond that now. Our dream is, and always will be, what we decide to manifest in our minds and chase after independently.
No wonder so many of us have lost our ability to be patriots.
We’ve poisoned ourselves against it.
So, while the very wise few are out there taking advantage of everything they’ve always had, the rest of the country is bitching about what we still don’t have.
“We could be better.”
Motherfucker, we are better…
Look at our past.
…
People don’t become happy by being unhappy. And bad things don’t dissolve by complaining about them. The mind does not thrive by focusing on everything that you hate about yourself.
That will never be the formula.
So, yeah.
The American Dream is dead, if you decide to think of it that way.
But it’s very much alive, very much available, and very worth it if we decide to expand on it with what we actually desire.
Don’t hate the American Dream because it doesn’t fit you.
Change it.
Truth and Love, Reader.
…
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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