(Essay on 250 years of American Dreams and its Dreamers)
My son and I were sitting around our kitchen table eating fish tacos with my dear friend Guido from Argentina. This was 2021, in New York City, at the nadir of COVID. Everything felt urgent then. I was getting messages reminding me to wash every grapefruit, every banana, and every doorknob before leaving the house and again upon returning. Somehow or other, the conversation turned to America—specifically, love of country.
“Are you patriotic?” Guido asked.
My son and I looked at each other, at first not quite knowing how to respond, or why he’d asked.
“Yes, I am,” I said.
My son smiled. “You really are.”
For Guido, who grew up during the era of the desaparecidos, who had family friends whose children were taken by the military junta and never seen again—some thrown into the sea from helicopters—patriotism was something closer to a punchline than a virtue.
So here we are, one quarter of the way to America at a thousand years old. I’m aware that for many, the understanding of America has come to resemble the Argentina Guido grew up in. I don’t dismiss them. There is real grief in this country’s ledger—promises broken, people failed, wrongs that took generations to name, and some not yet named. Anyone who loves America and claims otherwise hasn’t been paying attention. But disappointment, dwelt on long enough, becomes its own kind of fantasy: the dream of some flawless nation that has never existed anywhere, and never will.
America, like all things human beings have ever created, is an imagined thing—and in that sense, a very human thing. What has always made it something to be proud of, something to stand for, and something to protect is that the imagination has, so far, been largely a shared one. At its foundation are principles of liberty, justice, and the freedom to pursue one’s dreams and one’s happiness. It is an imagination that invites its citizens to imagine as well—to make manifest the fruits of that imagination in science, in the arts, in literature, in medicine, in technology, and in the continual work of self-government. I have spent time in the Soviet Union, in China, and in other places where such freedoms are far less apparent, and where you can feel their absence in the texture of daily life—in what people will and will not say aloud, in what they dare or do not dare to attempt. Where imagination is rationed, flourishing is rationed too.
We have the ability and the right to protest the wrongs we perceive in our society. As American citizens, we can say what we wish, write what we wish, and challenge administrations past and present without fear. Guido could not have said of the junta what I can say of any president, living or dead, in any newspaper in this country, under my own name—and sleep soundly afterward. Like many of the freedoms we enjoy, this is one we too easily take for granted.
John Adams understood that liberty depends upon something more than constitutions and elections. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” he wrote. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He believed that no system of government—however wisely designed—could preserve freedom if the people themselves lacked the discipline to govern their own passions. A republic, in his view, rests not ultimately on parchment or institutions, but on citizens capable of governing themselves—of exercising restraint, respecting the rights of others, and choosing persuasion over intimidation, law over violence.
Sitting now in the Hudson Valley, a two-hour drive from New York City, I am struck by the beauty of America, by its natural grandeur, its deserts and oceans, mountains and forests. Mostly, though, I am struck by its people. A striving people. A people relentless in the pursuit of their dreams.
Just this morning, a neighbor came by. His name is Corey. He works as a gardener, but that’s not really what he is. He’s an artist. A lover of trees and flowers. He knows how to build things, to repair things. He’s building a garage, he told me.
“It’s a metal frame. Some guys came up from South Carolina to set it up. I hope it lasts a long time.”
I could see how proud he was.
Corey’s wasn’t a grand dream. It’s only a garage, after all. It will house his tools and his and his wife’s cars. The ones they’ll use to drive their children to school, to buy groceries, to build a life, and to raise a family. Seen in that light, it becomes a very big dream indeed. An American dream. And it strikes me that Corey is exactly the citizen Adams had in mind—a man governing his own small plot of the republic: his work, his family, his patch of earth—asking nothing of his country but the freedom to build.
I hope that dream of America lasts a long time. Not because it is inevitable, but because it is worth preserving. It is imperfect, as all human creations are. Yet it remains one of the greatest acts of collective imagination the world has ever known.
If Guido asked me again whether I’m patriotic, I’d answer exactly as I did that day.
Then I’d tell him about Corey’s garage.
Happy Fourth of July.
Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated rock and roll performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author. He has been profiled in Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, Tablet, The Jerusalem Post, The Times Of Israel, and NPR. His newest book is: Suspended By No String: A Songwriter’s Refections On Faith, Aliveness, and Wonder (Regalo Press/Simon and Schuster)
For more of his writing follow Peter at peterhimmelman.substack.com