[bartsadowski | Adobe Stock}

The American Dream is Real. I’m Living Proof

July 1, 2021

I am the product of the American Dream.

There was a time when that notion wasn’t soaked in cynicism and meant something to people. It must have meant something to my father, who left a budding career as an oral surgeon in the Dominican Republic and, rather than start dental school all over again, quickly got a technician’s license here so he could support us. It must have also meant something to my mother, who left the only home she’d ever known to emigrate to New York City, where she would give birth to me: their first-generation American son, born the day my father secured his visa to join us for good.

I was an infant when we lived in someone’s attic and my parents worked to make ends meet. I was two when we moved into a New York City apartment and my father ran a dental laboratory out of the spare bedroom. I was five when he opened his business in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. And I was seven when we moved into a house in a New Jersey suburb, where we would enjoy a quiet street, a backyard pool, and endless possibility. Over the next twenty years, my father’s business thrived. My mother became a schoolteacher with a master’s in bilingual education. My siblings and I lived comfortable lives, privileged enough to entertain creative pursuits without worry. Things were far from perfect, but on just about anybody’s scorecard, my parents had won.

Through all of this, neither of them ever spoke a word about the American Dream, but they didn’t have to; they lived it with every move they made. Despite the struggle and the risk, they chose to try their luck because they believed in the possibility of building something better—and they succeeded.

I’m living proof of that.

American exceptionalism often gets a bad rap, and, depending on how you define it, much of it is deserved. There’s enough bad behavior and poor performance in the past two decades of our nation’s history alone to obliterate any notions of America being exceptional at anything, or to anyone. But there are ways in which America is truly singular, and they are what fuels the American Dream.

Unlike other countries, ours was founded upon ideas—an ideal. Despite themselves, the Founders crafted something that had the power to transcend them and their countless flaws (which, much to the chagrin of many patriots, cannot all be waved away with appeals to their being “men of their time”). They failed in many ways, but their ideas didn’t. The ideas improved and evolved, outliving and outgrowing their creators. The ideas lit a fire—one that rages in each of us as we struggle together to more closely embody them and become something more innovative, more unique, and more beautiful than the Founders could have—or would have—ever imagined.

Of course, there is a sense in which being American is akin to being Japanese, say, in that we’re referring to a place of birth, a chunk of land, a flag, and a set of laws to which you must adhere. But to be Japanese is, first and foremost, to be a people. It is an ethnic identification. Americans are by design many peoples brought together by a unifying set of ideas. That diversity and those ideas are what set America apart, and as a result there is a deeper, more resonant sense in which anyone can be an American—whether they ever set foot on our shores or not. The moment someone espouses those founding ideas—that we are equal before the law, that we are endowed with inalienable rights, that we have both freedom of and freedom from religion, that liberty, free inquiry, and freedom of expression are sacrosanct—that person becomes an American. You can live your entire life in Uzbekistan, South Korea, or Peru, but if you hold those ideas in your head and heart and follow them in word and deed, you are America.

No other country I know of can make that claim. No amount of study or assimilation or Japanophilia will ever make you Japanese—but one idea can make you American.

That is the power of ideas and the boundless potential of a nation founded upon them.

By that same token, it is possible to be American and not be American. You may have citizenship by birth, and you may have legal claims to this land that foreigners do not, but if you don’t uphold the ideas upon which this nation was founded, you are forsaking your birthright and putting those ideas in peril. In fact, there are undocumented immigrants living here right now that may be more American than you are or I am, because they believe in the American Dream in a way that we cannot. America must be earned. It must be fought for and preserved. It is the bequest of all who have that fire raging inside of them, kindled by those founding ideas. America’s history, terrible and tumultuous as it is, is ultimately  about immigration, integration, evolution, and unification under the aegis of those ideas. Many natural born citizens—me included—are at a perpetual risk of forgetting this. But people like my parents, who saw the ideal from afar and risked everything to achieve it, can remind us what the American Dream truly means.

Much like its founders, and much like ourselves, our country falls short in many ways. We are too often arrogant and infantile, petulant and obtuse, myopic and solipsistic. We have often failed to live up to our ideal, and we will continue to for as long as we are here. But the beauty of the American project is its capacity for self-correction. Its principles are so well-formulated that even opposition to those principles is protected by them. We live in a country where burning its flag simply cannot be a sign of disrespect to America, no matter what the burner intends, because the act itself reifies the ideas the flag symbolizes. That is beautiful. That is powerful. That is the exceptionalism that matters. We must continue working to deserve America—to strive to improve ourselves, to believe in the possibility of building something better, to create a “more perfect union.”

Union being the operative word there.

The late, great George Carlin once said, “it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Perhaps so—but you have to be wide awake to make it come true.

Just ask my parents.