The New American Dream

cross posted at Right Michigan

My Father's Father moved to Michigan in 1900. He was thirteen at the time of the journey and spent the exodus between Kokomo and Oscoda County driving a team of horses that would later provide much of the labor for the farmland that was purchased by his Father, my Great Grandfather, sight unseen.

In those days most of the land that would ultimately become farmland was not sitting there fallow, yearning for the plow. While much of the acreage had already been cleared by loggers in their rush to quickly produce timber, it was inconveniently accessible, much of it wet, and most of what remained was covered in tree stumps. Once the tree stumps had been removed by manpower, horse, and dynamite to reveal tillable land on the portion that was not swamp, the soil proved stony and less than spectacular.

The land he purchased came with no well, no septic, no picket fence, and no house, and most of the farms that did have existing houses on them still lacked the first three non-essentials. Farming was not an occupation of luxury. No living was ever carved from those early landscapes without the spending of buckets of sweat created by the toil of hardened hands. They knew this would be the case. And still they came.

With no home to live in, my Great Grandfather purchased the four walls of an abandoned home that stood in the already nearly deserted logging boomtown of McKinley on the AuSable River. As the timber forests waned to the bite of the ax, so too had McKinley succumbed to the industriousness of the loggers. McKinley, at the height of its existence in the late 1800s, was the largest town to have ever existed in Oscoda County. Shortly after the turn of the century however, most of its hovels stood vacant, their occupants having quickly moved on to live amongst other thinning forests of pine. It was one of these abandoned dwellings that would become an early home to my Grandfather's family.

With the help of his two teenage sons, my Great Grandfather disassembled the rough wood frame, sideboards, and roof, and transported the materials by wagon to his new property where the home was reassembled and tar papered, for luxury I suppose.

Twenty years after first entering Michigan, my Grandfather, having become a man himself and the father of his first daughter, bought his own farm of 200 acres where cows grazed, pigs slopped, and chickens roosted for nearly twenty five years under his care, and then under my Father's until he turned his last furrow in 1950--discouraged by that year's harvest, so poor it refused to produce even a windrow of hay.

The spread’s original 200 acres have since been whittled down to only 95. What remains to this day is rented to farmers who grow sweet alfalfa to be chewed by cows milked on other farms.

My Mother's Father moved to northern Michigan in 1906 from Canada, the son of a man who would later become the Amish Bishop in West Branch. As odd as it might sound, before the Amish considered electricity worldly, my Mother as a child enjoyed some of the first electricity available to anyone in the area. She still likes to brag that she used to be one of the "cutest little Amish girls around." Perhaps it was her vanity (but more likely it was as her marriage to my Father) that landed me in the Mennonite pews rather than attendant to Amish meetings every other Sunday. To this day I thank both her vanity and my parents marriage, just to be safe.

As Americans we each contain within our ancestry and family history a tapestry woven of life that makes us unique--a patchwork quilt of heritage and dreams that by comparison creates us all equally bland to the infinite quilt work that defines those who surround us. If I care to look back far enough, I am a bearded Canadian-English-Welsh-German-French Amish/Mennonite farmer inventor sawmill operator. My story is as pedestrian as it is unique. Not to burst your bubble, but so is yours.

It was not until 1931 that the term "The American Dream" was coined by James Truslow Adams though had it been forever unnamed it would still have resounded in the hearts of those that followed--that innate desire to achieve happiness through its judicious pursuit.

Over the past several decades, however, the American Dream has become somewhat less individually American and has adopted a more collectively European flavor. The pursuit of happiness, as it was referred to in the Declaration of Independence, amounted to an individual's desire to provide for himself as long as he did not illegally infringe on the pursuits and livelihoods of others.

Times have indeed changed.

To too many of today's Americans, the American Dream is no longer an individual pursuit achieved by a person's efforts and ability, but has instead become a deserved right of wealth, subsistence, comfort, education, transportation, child rearing and health provided by the collective, deliberately confiscated from other individuals to be enjoyed. These new thinking Americans still have an American Dream, but this one is slightly altered to include that notion of a good life provided to them, minus much of the effort.

As the times would dictate, leading in today's polls for President is a man who has effortlessly been allowed to shrug off the notion that individuals should be able to achieve outside of the collective. While his trusted friend stands atop an American flag, his mentors damn America, his employees commit voter registration fraud, and his advisers suck fortunes from tax subsidized enterprises, this candidate smiles and lectures to the adoring crowds that his is the plan that "provides" to thunderous applause.

Most of our ancestors worked their skin to the bone trying to claw an existence out of this land, its factories, its mines, and its commerce. Indeed, few ever achieved wealth as we would define it today, but nearly all of them improved their lives and those of their children through the pursuit of what it was that made them happy.

What incentive will the New American Dream provide?