» American Dream

I wrote "American Dream" after a long desire....

I teach at an inner-city public charter where the students struggle to overcome their personal circumstances to earn a high school diploma. I regularly see girls with great potential get pregnant by boys who will never provide any meaningful support to them and may even contribute to destroying them. I see boys with great futures dropping out and going to prison. Many of our students are homeless; just this week I was informed by another staff member from our school that he met the grandparents of one of my students when they came to the homeless shelter where he volunteers regularly.

I have long wanted to write a song that captures what I've seen. In this case, the chorus melody came first and the lyrics for it came right along with it. I was intrigued by the juxtapositioning of the words "Just an American Dream" and the realities I was portraying. In this song there are no suburban houses with picket fences. Crazy reigns supreme not in the dream world but in the real one. American politicians claim that they still believe in the American Dream, but that dream is not even within the realm of possibility for so many Americans. The politicians need to wake up to the reality that rags remain rags and rarely become riches in today's inner-city culture.

So yes, this is a protest song. It's a wake-up call, not a pessimistic eulogy for the American Dream. I do not subscribe to either party's platform for what is needed, because they are both founded on the American Dream of re-election, not the dirty and gritty reality of what needs to be done to effect real and positive change. The real answers are probably political suicide for whoever proposes them - but wars have been fought by Americans who were willing to die so that their country could pursue its ideals; are there no such heroes in American politics?