The American Dream....

[WCGreen]

What is it, what keeps this country going year after year, decade after decade...

People think that the American Dream is about material things, about amassing wealth, about having the biggest swinging dick in the world...

But to me, what makes America special, what makes America unique, is the ability to reinvent ourselves.

Here is a little story that I think is unique to our country. Not because it is about my brother, but it is a story that is repeated time after time across this country. It's what makes America what it is.


My brother graduated high school near the bottom of his class, five or six from the bottom of a class of over two hundred. He wasn't interested in school. In fact he couldn't wait to get out of school fast enough. He was in a work release program and spent half the day in class and half the day working at a car repair joint.

Well, after two years of working blue collar jobs, he had enough.

He studied and took the ACT and came in good enough to get into the community college. He studied hard and took his education seriously. Got great grades, went on to Ohio State, earned a 3.7 point average in Accounting and went on to get a masters degree and is now a senior partner in a successful accounting firm.

Me, I was the smart one and I spend way too much time posting on DU (I kid, I happen to be disabled and so I have a lot, no, too much time on my hands.)

What I am trying to say is that this is what makes the US unique. It isn't the huge war machine, nor the natural resources...

It's that we allow people to fail and pick themselves back up after they fall down. It's because, up to now, at least, a person could reinvent themselves, get a do over, try again after they failed.

Oh it's hard, no one ever said it was easy.

But that is the spirit of the pioneers, the explorers, the people who took a chance.

The odds are staked against us, but at least we can step up to the plate and try.

All the stuff the government does to help people help themselves is being put on the chopping block. The grants, the loans, the agencies there to help people help themselves are under attack by a political power who wants nothing more than to constrict the ability of "those" people from ever getting what they have.

And that, my friends, is the real story, the real conflict that this country faces as we go into the future.

This "I got mine, fuck you" attitude is stiffling this country. Plain and simple.


My brother is a conservative. He was a conservative way back when he was in the car pit, working on some one's brakes.

But he knows where he came from. He knows what can be done if you reach down inside and pull yourself up.

He sure doesn't like what is going on with his party.



Wrong plain... on edit

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. It's a great story, Chris...

Your brother had chances that so many don't get, because he lived here.

The European kids are tracked, as you know, and their destinies are pretty much settled early on...And it works pretty well as far as I know.

But here we can try, we can fail, we can change our minds.

I love that.

And the fact that the programs that help people do these things are being chopped...well, that tells me just where the Republican values are. Not with us. You got that right...

Recommended.

[FedUpWithIt All]

2. Recommended

The "I got mine, fuck you" is terribly short sighted and eventually this will be an unavoidable fact.

[WCGreen]

3. That has always been a force in American History and usually

we have, as a country, been able to overcome it...

But this time, it seems to me to have become this short of being institutionalized.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. Kick!

:kick:

[WCGreen]

5. Try a new crowd....