Changing The American Dream And Jelly Belly Beans

The average American wants a bit of the American Dream but most of us are unwilling to make the effort achieve it.  That is partly because the true American Dream is not so much about wealth and leisure time as it is a way of life. 

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We work hard to make money to finance big houses, fancy cars, and giant TV’s.  But we aren’t happy because in our drive toward wealth we have become frustrated and fragmented.  We have traded good family values, good parenting, pride, and good citizenship for ownership of possessions. We are too busy to listen to our kids, nurture our marriage, visit our parents, go camping or to the beach together as a family.  Too caught up in ourselves to be nice to the neighbors or our coworkers and customers, or to the people we pass on the street.  Too busy to participate in community affairs or to pursue a worthy cause.  We don’t even care if the work we do is truly good as long as we get paid.   We have become selfish and socially incompetent

When I was a kid, we weren’t taught that the world owes us for having been born.  We didn’t expect to have the best of everything all the time, every time, any time.  We were taught to work for what we got, to take pride in what we did, to value what we have, to view life as an adventure to explore, and to be decent, friendly, caring, and trustworthy people.  This was the foundation upon which the American Dream stood.

We knew our neighbors and did things together.  Merchants were friendly and cared about our needs.  Dads went to work and were proud of the good job they did.  Us kids had dirt piles and sticks instead of computers and we learned a lot as we invented, pretended, and interacted with one another.  We went on picnics, Sunday drives, visits to friends and relatives, and sat down to home made dinners and talked to one another. Most mothers stayed home and cooked, cleaned, and managed the household and were there to supervise the kids and apply band aids to scrapes, bruises, and tender emotions.  We had everything we needed, but not a lot of what we didn’t,  and our parents saved for the future.  We were happy knowing we had clean sheets, a warm house, and food on the table every day.  We had time to smell the roses and contemplate the stars in the night sky.  We had the American Dream.

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