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Among Friends |
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| Dream lives on Our two political conventions serve to remind us that our American dreams never die. It has been this way ever since British masters labeled our rebellious founding fathers as naive, uncouth sentimentalists whose colonies couldn't survive without mother England. The rebels' declared mandate to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is etched into our national DNA: If we work hard and dream big, rewards will follow. That mantra flows in a direct rhetorical bloodline from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln, straight on through every president and now through Barack Obama and John McCain. The dreams change -- emancipation during the Civil War, a chicken in every pot during the Depression, equal rights in the post-World War II era, and now universal health care -- but the fundamentals stay the same: national security, food and shelter, bigger dreams for our children. But slogging through our daily lives, it's easy to lose sight of the ties that bind us to our government. Bedeviled by bureaucratic red tape, escalating taxes, political cronyism and the ubiquitous pothole, we often forget to raise our own bar. That's reason enough to watch this summer's spectacles: to be reminded by the Olympics' record-setting physical performances and the conventions' carnivals of eloquence that every one of us has limitless possibilities if we pursue them with passion. When I was 13, my father lifted me onto his snow-dusted shoulders on a freezing October night to get a glimpse of Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy as his big black limousine glided past. Kennedy was just raising his right hand to brush back his famous hair when, for some reason, he changed his mind, looked out the window and waved at me. "He saw us, Daddy, he saw us!" I screamed. JFK's smile was my big payoff for passing out "Kennedy for President" flyers in our small Missouri subdivision and for refusing, on First Amendment principles, to remove my campaign button in history class. My second political romance was with RFK, and it began at the University of Kansas on March 18, 1968, where I heard him pick up his martyred brother's fallen torch and, at the height of the Vietnam War, challenge incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic nomination. "Some men see things the way they are and ask 'why?' I dream things that never were and ask, 'Why not?'" RFK told us, paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw. Now, on the 88th anniversary of women winning the right to vote, and the 43rd anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.,'s "I have a Dream" speech, it is Obama's turn to be full of promises and promise. This political novice uses his eloquence to invite disillusioned Americans to once again cast their votes "for hope, not fear." Millions are committing to Obama's promise that his administration will fix what ails us, that the old formulas of hard work and bedrock values can make our dreams come true if we elect him. "Hope," Obama told the nation the night he won the Iowa caucuses and became a serious presidential contender, "is not blind optimism. ... Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and work for it, and fight for it." Hope. It's always there, lurking in the American psyche despite the harshness of the real world. Hope propelled terminally ill Sen. Edward Kennedy out of his hospital bed to share his dynastic magic with us one more time. "It has been said," roared the ailing political lion, "that Barack Obama believes too much in an America of high principle and bold endeavor." Kennedy dismissed such skeptics, cynics and naysayers by lumping them in with doubters who warned his brother Jack that Americans couldn't go to the moon "because it's too far." The old sailor then exhorted us to set "our compass true" by electing Obama president because "the dream lives on." His dream, Jefferson's and Lincoln's and Obama's and McCain's dreams, your dream, my dream -- the details of hope don't matter. What counts -- what has always counted -- is the American dream. It's up to each of us to define what that means to us, then do what needs to be done to make it come true. |
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