American Dream

BY TODAY, having piled Christmas shopping, Christmas preparations and Christmas debt atop your regular workload, which scarcely slows a whit for the holidays, you may be privately thinking, "Merry Christmas -- enough already."If so, consider subscribing to Enough!, the quarterly journal of the Center for a New American Dream, whose slogan, "More Fun, Less Stuff!," is a fit and vital rallying cry for the new millennium.There is nothing frivolous about the mission of New American Dream, a private nonprofit with a budget around a million dollars a year, established a few years ago in Takoma Park.

AT a time when home-ownership rates are at record levels, some 72 percent of all white adults own their homes, compared with 46 percent of African-American and Hispanic adults.Closing the gap would give millions of African-Americans and Hispanics a shot at the "American dream" of homeownership. It would also give lenders a healthy boost in their profits.Why, then, are those who originate mortgages discriminating? Since this is the '90s and few fools actually put sheets on their heads and hurl racial expletives openly, the discrimination is probably unconscious.

DO YOU need it, or do you want it? So my father always replied to my childish request for some material thing.Usually, I had to admit, I just wanted it. Sometimes he'd buy whatever it was -- a reward for honesty, perhaps. Most times he'd decline and let the lesson sink in.I was reminded of the question recently as I read a letter to the editor of an Illinois newspaper from "Bill," husband of "Sue" -- fictitious names to protect the ignorant. Bill was complaining about state welfare laws that weren't measuring up to his and Sue's expectations.

Nancy Darr, a mother of three young children, was wrestling with a problem common to many American parents: How do I protect my children from the onslaught of advertising?Shut off the television, she decided."I felt really guilty at first because all the other kids are really into this," says Darr, who lives in Colorado. "But we made it a more gradual process. We didn't do it cold turkey. It took a few months to find out my guilt was unfounded. And we knew it was better for [them] in the long run."

Anyone who enjoys American drama should get to Anne Arundel Community College during the next two weekends for the Moonlight Troupers presentation of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons."The play's message, that we need more than the financial well-being embodied in the American dream, must have seemed revolutionary in 1947 and remains relevant.Miller has become one of our most admired American playwrights, but here in his award-winning "All My Sons," we see the work of a young playwright filled with idealism, innovation and a unique vision.

IRVINGTON, N.Y. - When Evan and Susan Ratner were shopping for a new home, they looked for a community like the one where they grew up in Smithtown, N.Y.: a development with young families, where children skated on cul-de-sacs and called to neighbors over backyard fences. They also wanted, and could afford, more luxury than their parents would have dreamed possible.It didn't take them long to find both.Much as the generation that grew up with a family station wagon has shown an appetite for even bigger sport utility vehicles, the children of suburbia who were raised in three-bedroom ranches, where elegance meant a basement rec room, are now buying luxury estate houses in subdivisions.

MEXICO CITY -- Now that the Soviet Union has been defeated, now that American capitalism reigns and this century's great ideological debate has been resolved, we are free to puzzle through other important questions.One of these surely is why a show like "The Simpsons" is so popular in the Third World. The show is steeped in the inside humor of American culture -- humor being the one thing most difficult to translate.You could understand the appeal of, say, "Baywatch," whose bathing-suit babes offer nothing too subtle to lose in translation.

Studs Terkel(1912-) was born Louis Terkel in New York City. First trained as a lawyer, he eventually worked as a Chicago stage actor and radio host. By the 1950s he had his own TV show. He later left TV, and devoted himself to radio, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities interpreted his liberal politics as a cover for Communist sympathies. Terkel is well-known for recording the opinions of Americans' on topics ranging from World War II and the Depression to the American dream.

It is the quintessential American dream: High school pals start a company on a prayer and a penny, develop pioneering products and build customers with bootstrap enthusiasm, and wind up a world market leader -- and billionaires.In a nutshell, that is the story of Bill Gates and Paul Allen and the company they founded in 1975 in an Albuquerque, N.M., motel room, Microsoft Corp.It is a story of entrepreneurial spirit that has had a profoundeffect on shaping the information age and the mass appeal of what promises to be one of the most powerful and pervasive technologies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the Internet.

In a world where college costs continue to rise faster than inflation and student loan payments can linger into middle age, the trend on many college campuses has been toward a nuts and bolts education that gives graduates immediately useful, salable skills.But meander through university course guides and Web sites this fall and you can still find some deliciously odd, entertaining and debatably useful courses being offered.Consider a graduate seminar in Stanford University's philosophy department: "Is Morality Too Demanding?"

This is what the American Dream looks like when you take soccer and fuse it with the promise and the possibilities of globalization: Oguchi Onyewu. Of course, Onyewu, 27, whose parents emigrated from Nigeria before he was born and raised him in Silver Spring and Olney, doesn't really look at it that way. He's just a hardworking, physically gifted, hyper-competitive center-back trying to fit in with a new team, AC Milan, which just happens to be one of the best soccer clubs in the world.

HOLLYWOOD - - Michael Jackson was the first great pop star whose career was shaped by television - not merely showcased by it, like those of Elvis Presley and the Beatles - and inseparable from the medium. He was indebted to it and influenced it in turn. Across his four-decade career, he was often someone to listen to, but he was always - for better and sometimes for worse - something to see. A lifetime of pictures came back into focus Thursday, as cable news outlets ran bits of old videos and Facebook bloomed with links to YouTube clips.

So Newt Gingrich now says Sonia Sotomayor is not a "racist" after all. She must be trembling with relief. Mr. Gingrich's backpedaling came last week in an article on HumanEvents.com. It leaves just two high-profile Republicans, former Rep. Tom Tancredo and radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh, still clinging to that absurd allegation. As you know unless you are just back from Antarctica, this sudden spasm of righteous Republican rage is due to a speech Judge Sotomayor gave in 2001 about the role gender, ethnicity and other characteristics play in a judge's judgment.

Here are excerpts from a speech on the nation's foreclosure crisis delivered by James H. Carr, chief operating officer of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, at an April 3 symposium at the University of Baltimore School of Law, co-sponsored by Baltimore Neighborhoods Inc. Foreclosure is the death of an important American dream - the dream of homeownership. It's a financial death for many families, often leading them to financial ruin. It's also a death of the prospect of passing significant wealth to children.

Will bill-payers also get public bailout? Friday's Baltimore Sun noted that approximately 11 percent of all Marylanders with home loans have either missed payments or are on the verge of foreclosure ("A record 11.1% of Md. home loans distressed," March 6). This will surely raise eyebrows in Washington as lawmakers scramble to have the government offer low-rate refinancing to those in such dire straights. But while this news offers a sober reflection on today's economy, what will happen to the other 89 percent of homeowners, who apparently manage their money properly?

Employment nightmare erases American dream I read with both empathy and dismay the "Out of work" article (Nov. 9). Two thoughts crossed my mind. First, the people interviewed seemingly were all law-abiding, upstanding citizens. Second, the magnitude of this epidemic was exacerbated by the fact that the employment niches ran the economic gamut, from janitor to information technologist. Look around. These people are our neighbors, our co-workers and in some cases our brothers and sisters, or mothers and fathers.

Hugo Lam sees his story in Barack Obama's. Certainly, there are differences. Lam was raised in Nicaragua by hardworking parents who inspired him to seek a better life in the United States. Obama is a native son of Hawaii and spent time in Indonesia; he was born to a black goat-herding father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas. But Obama's meteoric rise from humble beginnings to the nation's highest office resonates, Lam said, as the ultimate American success story - proof that while the streets might not be paved with gold, they still can lead to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. "I think for every Latino I speak with, his story is our story," said Lam, 39. "He comes from a poor family, a mixed family, and struggled as a teenager and found his way. He made himself succeed, and that is the American dream.

Now, we can view our futures differently For generations, when African-Americans were growing up, someone would ask, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Answers would vary as African-American young people gazed through the lenses of historical limitations. After Tuesday night's presidential victory for Barack Obama, making him the first African-American president, we can view our future differently. Now we can believe with renewed hope that it is possible to overcome the odds, realize our dreams and be whatever we want to be. We can't celebrate this historic event without acknowledging the contributions of so many who dared to dream, sacrificed and suffered so that all people would be able to experience the American dream.

BEIJING - Henry Cejudo called it the American dream. The son of undocumented Mexican immigrants who had to work two jobs to keep food on the table, Cejudo gave the United States an Olympic gold medal in freestyle wrestling yesterday with a stunning win over Japan's Tomohiro Matsunaga in the 55-kilogram (121 pounds) final. "I'm living the American dream right now, man," Cejudo, wrapped in an American flag, said moments after his win. "The United States is the land of opportunity. It's the best country in the world, and I'm just glad to represent it."

ATLANTA -- The mythology of the Old West is replete with tales of dry land and drought, of parched landscapes and prayers for rain. Hollywood has told many a story of rainmakers - men, and occasionally women, who wandered the prairie with promises of a magic that could cause the heavens to open up and pour water down upon the earth. Suddenly, the desperation that drove such claims doesn't seem so far-fetched in the Southeastern United States, where severe drought is drying up wells and emptying reservoirs.