Dispatch to My Fellow Americans #001
some thoughts up until the 2022 election
Let me start with one of my sayings: “Upon the individual rests the fate of the nation.”
If you are an American or a Norte Americano as we are called south of the border since everybody in North, Central and South America is also an American, then you need to feel the weight of the above saying on your shoulders because it is.
America is a dream built piece by piece by the individuals who occupy and participate in it. What each of us do every day, morning to night is either helping to build the dream or tear it apart. Each of us has our own American dream, our own hopes of a better future. We are all individually working out our dreams and what we want them to be should we ever be able to fulfill them. All of our dreams together make up our collective dream as a nation. This is the accumulated atmosphere or national ambiance, mood and character we are creating individually and together.
There are those among us who are good at articulating what our collective dream is or could be. But since everyone can dream whatever they like, there are often many different conflicting voices and angles on what that dream should be. So I am going to try to lay out what the American Dream is from my angle of view.
We all assume that we all understand what America is all about. But in observing the actual practice of being an American, it seems many of us don’t really quite get the idea or have a completely contrary idea. We are living in what people are calling a highly polarized social and political environment and even in a very dangerous time for our democracy. Why is this? We are all Americans. What’s the problem?
The problem is that there are many problems.
An a nation of individuals a good place to start is with the idea that we have to accept that we are all Americans whether we like each other or not. We don’t have to like each other but we do need to respect each other as Americans, to tolerate each other as fellow citizens. What any citizen deserves we all deserve and we all should work to defend and respect each other as we would want to be defended and respected as an American.
So this means it is incumbent on each of us, for our own good as an American living in a democratic society, to participate with our fellow citizens in the protection of our mutual dream which includes; our individual rights, our individual freedoms and our ability to have a voice in how we govern ourselves as a nation and be allowed to pursue our happiness.
Being an American is to be a part of a society that is diverse, is composed of individuals from all nations and cultures of the world who practice various religious traditions, who come from various circumstances, Live in various economic circumstances, have various talents, limitations and handicaps. The equalizer is that we are all Americans. This is our generic commonality and is the basic way we should see ourselves and each other beyond our distinctions and differences. This is our common ground.