Dagmaraka
"and as one of the immigrants you are challenging, i in turn challenge you to at least read up on what american dream is. you seem to have no idea about concepts you throw around."
Here is my voice from Iran about American dreams
" It is difficult to live through the opening years of the new millennium, symbolised tragically by the nightmare of 11 September 2001 and the two American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, without stumbling on the concept of “The American Century” formulated in a 1941 Life magazine article of that title by Henry Luce.
This lengthy article is devoted to what Luce calls “American internationalism”. Its last paragraph is not very distant from my own current fears and anxieties concerning the real face of the American dream in our world:
“The other day, Herbert Hoover said that America was fast becoming the sanctuary of the ideals of civilization. For the moment it may be enough to be the sanctuary of these ideals. But not for long. It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than angels. America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of the skilful servants of mankind, America as the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice - out of these elements surely can be fashioned a vision of the 20th century to which we can and will devote ourselves in joy and gladness and vigor and enthusiasm.”
Henry Luce’s appeal could be, and was, seen by some as a call for United States imperialism and the creation of a capitalist and militarist century. What is more significant, however, is that it sees the American dream as the typical expression of the American century.
The prospect that Luce glimpsed in 1941 has, over six decades later, become an unavoidable reality: America is the only superpower left free to define and impose its dream in the new world order.
The American dream is the centerpiece of a national intention, which holds the country’s citizens tightly together. But it also has multiple meanings for people elsewhere in the world. To some, it represents a chauvinistic cliché, to others a symbol of good life and achievement. Some, meanwhile, believe that the dream has proven to be the most effective tool ever invented for the subversion of other cultures.
In short, people in many countries have a stake in the American dream. The American dream is not only the dream of the Americans, but the dream of others to become American. From the very beginning, America, the land of freedom, has also been the world’s dream: a society built on new foundations, held together not by traditions, but by the idea of a generous and hospitable country open to any experience.
I believe that the secret of the American dream’s power of attraction lies in the “invention” of America as a dream. 1492, after all, marks something deeper than the arrival of Columbus after a trans-oceanic voyage; it enshrines the American dream as the founding principle of the nation.
The idea that Columbus’s journey represented dream rather than mere arrival has had many consequences. It defined America as a “new world” and cast its past into an imaginary time. In the centuries after Columbus, fresh images of America both perpetuated and expanded the narrative of the American dream. A central part of this narrative has been a persistent faith in the values of democratic individualism as the indispensable guardians of personal dignity and individual opportunity.
The narrative found a ready echo in the experience and aspirations of generations of non-Americans too, for whom America came to represent a new world where anything can happen and any dream can become reality. Millions of them (including many Iranians) have followed Columbus, moving to America to seek their own place in the narrative of the American dream.
This conjoining of origin, values and journey is both anticipated and universalised by John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government: “In the beginning all the world was America”.
The American dream, then, is not exclusively American. But Locke’s words are a reminder of the other dimension of this truth: that America also “belongs” to the world. Can this universalising potential today be released in newly generous, enlarging ways, even for those who will remain forever beyond America’s shores?
Martin Luther King stressed that Americans cannot themselves be free unless people are free in the poorer nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America. I believe that today such an inclusive, interdependent awareness is essential in helping us initiate a dialogue which will establish a plural globalisation as a paradigm for understanding and reshaping the world order.
This, perhaps, is the challenge of the new “American century” – to redefine the “American dream” as a renascent connection, a shared enterprise, a journey of exploration, a global commons. This is a dream of inventing a new world and a new America.
Yours ever,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-letterstoamericans/article_2067.jsp
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