Waking America

I christen this space thusly.

Americans have woken and forgotten their dreams, thanks in no small part to the new (read: 25 years old) top down education system. For around one hundred and sixty years the Americans dreamt most vivid dreams, chiefly to conquer their new land and let freedom reign o'er it. Let no one abridge the only American heirlooms -- land and liberty!
But in the 1930s American romanticism turned populist under a new kind of ruler the likes of which America had never seen -- a man born to be a king. And the Americans dreamt all the more vividly! But now as this turn of sorts reveals its ugly mug, Americans awake and dream no more!
The American Dream, my countrymen, is on life support. We killed it four generations ago in our lust for romantic empire! And now we wake to the unassailable fact that our forbears fought for an America that is fading to memory. We wake to responsibility for romanticizing the dream long after it had been corrupted -- for allowing ourselves naive seduction by a new sort of "common dream." The day of reckoning, long delayed, has come.

We are waking to the sorry state of current America, with all of its much discussed troubles. But now we must decide not to return to fallow dreams of utopia where individuals' dreams are coercively sacrificed to the shared vision, and instead to remake our sphere that we may yet dream American again. We must properly identify the path to current plight so we may retread our steps and begin anew. This is the only way to again make our country safe for the dreamer of American dreams.

How did this happen? It is not merely the story of an ambitious and irresponsible man with a loud and inspirational voice. Nay, the answers are many and are hard -- but we must find them, for this land and people are not without an ounce of the promise held in times gone by. These answers must come from America, not its self-anointed leaders in academia and politics. For it was our fathers, and not their similar forbears, who had made America great beyond our own imaginations.

So let us reminisce, and think about what may yet be if we allow ourselves not to forget.
To a time when America's heart, the Midwest, beat with a vitality not seen since.
To a time when men rose and fell of their own labors and ingenuity, and not somebody elses.
To a time when our nation was of law and not men.
To a time when possibilities were unfettered by anointed kings.
To a time when cities were places of promise, activity, commerce, and beauty.
To a time when men were men and women women, and when men wore hats.
And to a time more American than our own -- a nation which had an identity now faded. The identity of heterogeneous commonality. A people with one thing in common -- individual liberty.

This is for waking America, that it remembers the splendor and ingenuity which is uniquely American, and yearns to dream again.