The American Dream...Tomorrow

News Commentator Paul Harvey once remarked, “Tomorrow has always been better than today, and it always will be.” An eternal optimist in every respect, Harvey constantly rang the bell of freedom in America during his life. As the host of Paul Harvey News & Comment and The Rest of the Story, his death in 2009 marked the end of an era for broadcasting and for this country’s greatest generation of Americans.

As we turn the page on a new decade and century, questions surround the future feasibility of the American Dream. For years it has stood tall in New York harbor, over America’s heartland, and to the other shining sea. I have already outlined the core principles of yesterday and today’s American Dream (freedom, opportunity, hard work, and determination). I felt I was pessimistic in my last post on America’s current feelings toward the American Dream. Or, maybe I over represented the views of a few cynics.

I am tremendously hopeful that in America’s heart, flag-waving, cross-bearing, and Uncle Sam-loving will continue for many decades to come. For millions of Americans in the heartland, the American Dream is the same now as it ever was and will ever be. Home ownership and the hard work, determination, and freedom that come with it are very important to the majority of Americans. And I do not fear that these desires will pass from American minds anytime soon.

“Each generation imagines that we’re all going to hell. Each generation goes through a little hell and comes out heat tempered and better than before.” I find these words of Paul Harvey particularly applicable in today’s age of doubt. With the 2000s as a small window, we saw the rise and fall of American opinion after 9/11, Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and the recession. Whatever conflicts, internal and external, come our way over the course of the next century we must realize that our fathers and forefathers endured trial in defending their country principles. If we love the American Dream and aspire to it as much as we say we do, we must be willing to bear its burdens however unfavorable at the time they might be. So that we might preserve for future generation that two-story house with a white picket fence in a suburban neighborhood with a family of smiling faces in the front yard.