American Dream

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.

Let's assume for a moment that you are living the American Dream.You own your own home. You are doing better financially than your parents did at your age. You assume your children will do better still.And then, at 9 tonight, you sit down in your cozy living room and watch an hour of television that leaves the American Dream lying in pieces on your lap. And when you go to bed, you lie down with the new American Nightmare.What if I lose my job?What if my children can't find decent jobs?What if the American Dream can't ever be put back together again?

HOW DID America get to this place? It is the electorate in a democratic superpower that is ultimately responsible for the power wielded in its name. Citizenship demands focused attention. It requires staying awake, even for the boring parts. We have opted for distraction instead. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, education theorist Neil Postman notes how 19th century farmers and villagers turned out for hours-long debates by the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. We would rather spend the night at Home Depot buying lawn furniture.

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.

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.

Two months before their wedding, Rita Nurmi and Brian Kay got the present of their dreams -- the keys to a modern two-story town house inAnnapolis.With excited smiles, they rushed into their new home and went from room to room, admiring the freshly painted cream-coloredwalls, the well-equipped kitchen and the muddy back yard.They talked eagerly about their plans to fill the empty rooms with furniture. Kay, a sous chef at the Treaty of Paris restaurant in downtown Annapolis, inspected the kitchen with an eye toward cooking romantic dinners after his April 5 marriage to Nurmi.

LOS ANGELES -- In Peoria, Illinois, last week at Caterpillar Inc., the United Auto Workers gave up after 17 months, ending the longest strike of the 1990s -- with no gain whatever for its 8,700 members.In Seattle, 32,500 members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers are still holding out after nine weeks on picket lines at Boeing Aircraft in what could be the most important big strike of the '90s -- or the last.The voices of management and labor, and of academics and stock analysts, sound like this:* ''We're in the business of making profits for our shareholders.

In a major step toward bringing the nation's largest retail and entertainment complex to Silver Spring, Montgomery County officials yesterday agreed to join forces with a Canadian real estate firm to develop the $585 million project.The agreement to proceed with the so-called American Dream represents the latest in a decade-long effort to revitalize a 28-acre tract in Silver Spring's derelict urban core, roughly equivalent in size to downtown's Charles Center.Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan, in announcing the agreement with Triple Five Development Eastern Ltd., compared the project to Harborplace, the Rouse Co.'s festival marketplace that revitalized the Inner Harbor 16 years ago."

WASHINGTON -- A bunch of the nation's 31 Republican governors met privately with prospective GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole here the day before he announced his decision to quit the Senate. In their discussion about his lagging campaign, Senator Dole never mentioned his intent.That fact suggested the great weight he and his strategists placed on the shock value of the announcement. Certainly in Washington and political circles elsewhere, the news was indeed a shocker, considering Mr. Dole's long romance with the Senate and particularly his status as its majority leader.

A COMPUTER SEARCH of the words "dream" and "Washington" and "mall" heretofore would mostly turn up references to Martin Luther King's famous civil rights' speech before the Lincoln Memorial. From now on, that same cyber-surf would lead to a much different type of dream: a $600 million shopping complex proposed outside D.C. in Silver Spring.The unabashedly named American Dream Mall is so grand that its plans conjure up the kind of wonderment and disbelief that greeted Jim Rouse's Harborplace or Walt Disney's "World."