9/12/2007 - Our World: Realize the depth of the American Dream

The American Field Service student exchange program landed me as a senior in a high school in Ohio in 1961-1962, a time when my native country’s political leadership was unfriendly with the United States government because of Cold War politics and the Vietnam War. Speaking little English, I lived with an American family—whom I credit fully for showing me the first seed of freedom.

I was shocked to read a letter that my American father, who owned a shop in town, wrote to President John F. Kennedy about his policy toward my native land. My own father would have faced difficulties to write such letter to our leader, but here Americans enjoyed their right to freedom of expression.

At a time of the American civil rights movement—when more than one restaurant door was shut in my face during business hours—I was fascinated and captivated by the high American energy and belief in freedom and justice. Indeed, I grumbled over the less-than-perfect American society—my jingoism at age 17 still makes me blush today—but I already sought help for a scholarship from an American liberal arts college.

I returned to college in 1963. My parents thought I would study engineering or medicine. I enrolled in the political science program.
I like clichés. They make me think. The first poster I bought in college had a sketch of a blindfolded man, arms chained, mouth and ears taped. It reads: “You can blindfold me, shut my mouth, close my ears, chain my hands, but you cannot prevent me from thinking.” Ah, you can imprison a man but not his thought; even if you kill him, his thought lives on.

Then I heard professors quote someone or another, “I don’t agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Wasn’t it French philosopher Voltaire who said, “I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write?” Giving one’s life to defend someone’s right to write what insults you?

My home country’s top leader used to say, if you want a revolution you don’t send your children to learn in Peking, Moscow, or Havana; you send them to study in Paris, London and Washington.

In my own way I read and re-read—as I still do today—the words in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Where on earth would any human equipped with reason not accept the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as an ideal goal to work toward, with the first 10 Amendments to the U.S. Constitution as basic tools?

Idealism is not reality, and reality has many ugly things. So men and women of reason and intellect come up with ideas which lead to perception, a factor for action, or not. The American forefathers made it an American ideal to build a free and just society that allows the full degree of humaneness to develop.

My parents must have had knots inside as I made political science my goal, until I obtained a Ph.D. in the field from one of America’s top schools. My mother’s preaching obviously didn’t get through: The way to lose your best friend is to argue politics or religion or love. Oh, well. I practiced it in my home country before my parents’ eyes, and I taught the subject in U.S. universities until I retired.

On Sept. 6, I logged on to the Christian Science Monitor and was captured by a column, “Deepening the American Dream,” by Eduardo J. Padron, the president of Miami Dade College, a foreigner who came to America at age 15 when he spoke little English and had few prospects. A believer in transforming life through learning, Padron writes, “The American dream’s energy of possibility is alive and well among the nation’s immigrants.”

Padron admits that the “lure of the material dream” is strong, but believes “underneath it may lurk the deeper, visionary dream.” He writes about impoverished Luisel Pena, a Cuban immigrant who advanced from Miami Dade College to Yale University by his mid-20s, and who says he came to America “in search of a dream.” Pena confessed that abandoning his native land was “like dying a little, to be born again into a different life, and, eventually, a different me.” Pena acknowledges his parents’ “sacrifices in the name of a future that now belongs to me.”

Padron referenced San Francisco State University philosophy professor Jacob Needleman’s Winter 2003 essay, “Two Dreams of America”—the first dream, a “vision of what can be, even what ought to be,” and the second, a “deception, a night creature of mere seeming.” Italian-born Dr. Carlo Brumat is Needleman’s example of an immigrant who finds America “the land of the economic refugees of the world”; former Afghan professor Ghulam Taymuree, who fled the 1981 Soviet invasion and finds America the land of “freedom of movement” with the human mind, human thinking, and the energy of the human psyche, said: “That is what America gives—the possibility of becoming full human beings.”

As Padron referenced Needleman, “The great purpose of the American nation … was to form a sheltering environment that would allow men and women to pursue the inner search: America the womb, the incubator of great human understanding.”

Padron says the American dream is “too often defined by what one owns and attains—no longer the dream of being,” and urges Americans not to forget what has stirred such men as Pena and Taymuree, the “searching individuals who sense what, too often, Americans themselves have forgotten.”

Republished with permission.

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