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Thanks to a fortuitous combination of bad weather and good friends early last week, I met an interesting fellow, Adrian Sutton. He's a 31-year-old British photographer, freshly returned from dismal spots like Sudan, Cambodia and Houston.
He's working on a book. At first, Martha and I thought
the book was Conspicuous Consumption Around the
World.
He mentioned that he'd just been in Boulder,
where he met people who spend hundreds of dollars at their
dentists to get realistic fangs attached for Halloween
parties.
He also said he had never eaten better than at the U.N.
administrative camps in famine areas. Big five-course
meals, four times a day, for the administrators. A mile
away, they're serving three biscuits and a cup of green
tea, twice a day, to the victims of famine.
Then we thought he might be collecting material to show the essential similarities of organized medicine around the world. He heard of a Salida carpenter who broke his leg, arrived at the local emergency room, and was sent packing to Colorado General, since the carpenter had no medical insurance. Adrian told us of the Cambodian villagers he lived among. Many of them died for lack of $6 -- the price of a malaria shot.
But Adrian Sutton hazarded the interior of this continent for another reason. His book is about the American Dream. He's just asking Americans to explain their personal versions of the American Dream.
As he pointed out, It's peculiar to the United
States. You never hear of the French Dream or the Peruvian
Dream.
The dream appears often in American rhetoric. Who can
forget Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream
speech?
Who can remember Richard Nixon's statement that Americans
needed the lift of a driving dream
?
Perhaps the American dream goes to the very start. One founding father, Alexander Hamilton, dreamed of building the richest nation on earth; another founder, Thomas Jefferson, dreamed of a land of liberty. Their divergent visions begat our two major political parties.
At an impromptu potluck, we made sure Adrian got to ask others about the American Dream. The similarity of their answers to my own should not be surprising, given that we were all white middle-class parents. We live in comfortable houses in a pleasant town. Our kids are healthy. We generally like what we do. We don't have it all, but we probably have enough.
But we're all scared. Scared that something will happen to one of our kids, and then everything we've worked for will vanish into medical bills. Scared that a government agent will appear at the door (taxes? the wrong garden plants? barking dog? insensitive speech? there are dozens of reasons), and we'll be chewed up by the legal system. Scared that the economy will lurch downward again, and we'll still have a president who says all is well even though record numbers of Americans get food stamps.
In short, many of us are consumed by the American Nightmare, not by the American Dream, whatever it is.
But maybe you're different. If you've got an American Dream, send it to me c/o the Post, and I'll forward it to Adrian Sutton. With his perspective, he may be able to make sense of it all. It's beyond me.
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