The Death of an American Dream

There is a man in a gray woolen suit, a suit of many years ago, rough, itchy, one in which his children can smell his tobacco, their senses still so keen, but more likely one which they catch only a trace of him as he keeps himself, his Lucky Strikes, his Old Spice, tauntingly away from them, letting them think they don't matter, at least not to him as he points to a model of his latest creation, a highway, showing - no telling - the mayor where it will run as his nicotine-stained fingers bisect a suburb, his pinky dangling above its occupants arrogantly, at a distance to them as well, as he plots their neighborhood's demise, however inadvertently, because the inhabitants below his fingers do not matter; all that matters is his building, his planning, his legacy and his power.

Below his fingers lies William. William is a baby. His mother stays at home with him along with her mother while his father, barely a man himself, works a night shift in a factory making electrical conduit. Money is tight but they work it out and more importantly, they are happy. They have everything they need right in their neighborhood, no need to own a car. They can walk to any store they need and the stores are affordable, existing for local consumption not just convenience. This is how city neighborhoods used to be before the man in the gray woolen suit started planning. Then, people stayed in their neighborhoods.

William's father wants him to grow up and play for the Giants even though they're moving to California, the Giants that is. His mother wants him to be a concert pianist, a dream she could never fulfill herself and saves the nickels and dimes in an old pickle jar for his future lessons. William's dad believes if he works hard, comes in everyday, he'll move up, maybe get a foreman's job and really support his family, give them the life they deserve. William is too young still to dream for himself as his fingers hold tight to his bottle, his only immediate concern, while fingers swirl above him in all directions casting him a fate that no one in his family could imagine.

Within no time at all the construction will begin and William's dad will hardly give it notice, not at least until the clearing starts and one of the nastiest of all phrases in a modern progressive society gets volleyed about: eminent domain. Yes, the seizing of your property (with appropriate compensation of course) by a government, municipality for the collective good, quite a few relative terms used to justify an absolute crime. That crime will not affect William's dad directly, though the candy store on the corner where he bought his paper, talked baseball, will soon disappear. So will the barbershop, Joe's, where the proprietor lumbered about, buzzing and clipping all the local men. Joe's retiring to Long Island where the lack of urban vibrancy will quickly kill him. It won't be long before the bank moves on the other side of the new highway. Privately owned, two-family homes will be torn down, their expanse making room for low-income tenements, all part of the modus operandi of the Master Planner. Then, once the bank is gone and a good deal of the split levels, the grocery store will be next not being able to stay afloat until the new tenements go up.

Yet, William's dad stays put, as do his co-workers because their jobs are so near. But unbeknownst to him, his fate has already been sealed as well and sadly as the fate of his son.

There is a war coming, one we have no business being in. Yet we will engage and seek to destroy people who were no threat to us whatsoever. As the war would progress so would the parting of Americans, separating those that believed in the system from those who felt that current events only verified that the system was stacked against them. Discontentment and blame would fester on both sides and the continual raping of William's neighborhood would go unprosecuted as the offenders hide behind history. The time is rife with distrust.

The tenements went up and with the low-rent housing came low-rent values. William's dad was laid off from the factory and the Master Planner was right there with an unemployment check which, in short order, turned into a welfare check as William's dad's factory closed and his job was moved to Long Island where most of the defense contracts went. Now with all this spare time on William's dad's hands, his feeling of inadequacy, his loss of self-worth, his fear, fell him into bad company and it wasn't long before he had new acquaintances in the tenements. People who could use his spare time, his loss of self-esteem, his fear, brought him into a world that exists to medicate the very symptoms from which he was suffering. Now that he was receiving a meager yet steady income from the government, William's dad in essence was getting a certification of his societal unworthiness each and every month.

You see, there is one thing that a progressive society has yet to comprehend and that is that there is only a slight difference between making it possible for a man to walk again and making it impossible for him to ever again walk like a man. They can't navigate that difference.

Such was the case with William's dad and by the time William was ready to receive his first Communion at the church that now had to lock its doors six days a week and block the stained glass with iron bars William's dad was peering through iron bars at Riker's Island. Gone were the dreams of William roving the outfield at Candlestick Park. Gone were the pickle jars full of nickels and dimes - a casualty of having one's parents embrace addiction. Yes, William's mother as well, lost, trying to work, to help support the family failed too and after her mother succumbed to a long illness most of which William and his mother tended to, she too fell deep in despair and sought comfort in the tenements. And now, with William's dad gone and his mom spending more and more time in the tenements, with all those men there, with all their money, and their drugs, and their clients, there is only one fate left for William's mom and it is the witness of a fate that no boy should ever have to endure.

And, what of William, sweet William, will his innocent flesh be pierced with the poison that has infected his family? Will he steal, murder for his addiction? Or worse, will he do it as a matter of course? Can we save the innocence that lies now in his bones and exuberates through his wonderful, youthful smile? Have you seen him when he's happy? Have you seen him when he's laughing, his head tilted back, his eyes smiling as his laugh gurgles through his teeth? Have you seen him? Is he near you? Is he one of yours?

Don't let him go. Hold him. Squeeze him so that innocence stays bottled up forever. Teach him good things. Teach him honor by being honorable. Teach him compassion by understanding. Teach him charity with selflessness. Let him laugh. Let him cry but be there, always. Keep that needle out of his arm. For, it is there, in that syringe, where true sin lies.

An ignorant fraud once said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." No Karl, opium is the opiate of the masses. Religion is a vehicle for morality and morality is a pillar stone of a just society. We, in this country are blessed with freedom of religion, specifically deemed as a right, so as not to be taken away. We are not shackled by the concept of "freedom" from religion, treating this vehicle as if it needs to be eradicated from all aspects of our public lives. To think such is a perversion of this right and more than likely, an intentional one.

The Catholic Church teaches William that he is born with original sin. Yet, when you see William you will find that so difficult to believe. We are not born equal in capacity but equal in dignity and some of us seem to further this dignity by virtue of their capacity, their own greatness. Sometimes this is so evident since we are not born blank slates, as any parent can attest. However, we are born with personality, some greater than others. It is with such irony that William, whose personality is so great, is born of a heritage, not a soul, infected by the original sin of our constitution and his young life now has been nearly destroyed by its acquired sin.

Yes, his blood, his flesh, his bones carry with them the genetic memory of being dragged from a village in Africa to ply themselves and propagate under forced servitude for the financial benefit of English colonists. This acceptance, the delay of its abolition, and the justification of its existence are all part of our American original sin. A nation was born, like many human beings, flawed and fragile. It is difficult to blame our founders when you stand from outside this gene pool and can objectively see their concerns to keep a union that had shed so much blood to only just be acquired and precarious a union, it was as uncertainty and enemy vessels lay off our shores waiting for a sign of weakness in order to capture the great treasures of the colonies.

It is easy, however, from within this gene pool to gather the anger and hatred having one's blood-line cast into the genus of animal and be denied on paper one's God-given grace and dignity.

Therein lie the seeds for the Civil War, a washing, if you will of our original American sin, a washing with rivers of blood followed by a hundred years of social upheaval all made possible by the very document that accepted its existence. The constitution is so complex and intricate, a document that it has forced an evolution of mankind toward equality. Yes, there were massive injustices along the way but it is a constitution, not a magic wand and I don't think the founders could have ever foreseen the greatness it has created. They wanted to limit the powers of the slave states, which is why they negotiated the 3/5's clause reducing the slave state's representation by having 5 slaves equal 3 people of population toward representation. This wasn't an attempt to insult their human value (there is no greater degradation than the title of slave). This was a strategy to keep our original sin from being embellished by those who did not have the same view of freedom as our founders. Unfortunately, William's dad and William will be taught otherwise.

While William's discontent with his country has its roots in the constitution's original sin, it is its acquired sin that now serves to seal his fate and keep most of his race as a subculture in society. The acquired sin of the U. S. Constitution was inserted by means of the 1936 Constitutional Revolution. As a life-long Democrat, the shame associated with this part of history is only surpassed by the century-long Dixiecrat racism that infected and perverted our party. It is shame for me because FDR was a hero of mine. To me FDR was the great president, the man who saved us, the world, from fascism and communism. He was a father figure to the point when one would ask oneself, "What would FDR do?" when confronted with a socio-political question. However, as with most childhood heroes, he deflates under close scrutiny in his domestic attempts to counteract the evils of capitalism with his assault on the U.S. Constitution in 1936, something which is forgivable only if you accept the progressive notion that our founders were morally corrupt while every shred of evidence, writing, points to the exact opposite. He and all the "New Dealers" threw the baby out with the bath water, being unable to discern the evils of capitalism as the evils of man and falsely believing that the government would be immune to such evils.

The Great Federal Government with tentacles in every minutia of its citizens' lives, good or bad, has become father to our children, caregiver to our aging parents, constable to our neighborhoods, healer of the sick and injured, protector from evil invaders, deliverer of information, educator, employer, interpreter, counselor, steward of the land, sea and air, a true deity if there ever was one. It is so magnificent we should construct a monument to it. We have, it's called the Federal deficit. "Now," Lincoln said at Gettysburg, "we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." This is our great acquired sin. Its eradication will require no less a commitment of blood and guts to wash away than that of our great original sin.

No, I am not talking about biological blood and guts but of the fortitude that will need to be present, at the ready, the moment you lose everything. That an American Dream based on the acquisition of assets is a house of cards and one that will tumble easily once stressed and that day will come because an upside down system has no choice but to stress that house of cards. The question is when the time comes will you know what happened, why it happened and what to do next? They will try to sell you on extending the current system, the propagation of government, because it is in their best interest. These are only band aids that will only defer the payment you must make, will make anyway.

The things we see today, riots, political upheaval abroad, the domino effect of default of European nations are all just rumblings before the quake. The results of all of these events serve as a wake-up call to us but are having real impact overseas. The system will not collapse imminently because we here are adjusting, tweaking our way into an economic malaise that will last a decade. We are bereft of leadership and worse, of ideas. The traditional economic stimulants have been rendered void. Interest rates can go no lower. Taxes cannot be further cut.

As the European condition worsens and ours stagnates a sort of class warfare will develop between those suffering overseas and those here just getting by. The only thing missing in this formula, hidden in "central casting" is the charismatic figure. His appearance over the next decade will be a declaration of war and the U.S. dollar will no longer be the world's reserve. It is then that the Great Washing will begin.