I read the news today, oh boy.
Another killing, another controversy, another quarter back in hot water.
And you know, it's just been awhile since I've seen something genuinely inspiring unfold in the pages of the morning paper.
It's been awhile since I've seen a morning paper.
The times are changing, and so are we.
And it makes you wonder, at least it makes me.
What has happened to our country?
And I don't mean the usual "Down with Big Brother", "Viva La Revolucion" sort of crap, I mean. Really.
What's become of the nation we call home?
We're less a centerpiece for innovation and more a conversation piece in humiliation, we aren't as great as we used to be.
We're no longer the freest, or the richest, or the smartest, just the strongest. We're the best defended, and what does that say about our culture?
The dream is over, the pioneer spirit's done and gone and all we've got left is a few hundred million people trying to scrape by, and carry on - well we've seen better days, and where have they gone?
"Give me liberty or give me death" has become "Give me money, give me food, give me everything". Our sense of entitlement is suffocating to the point that I wonder why we celebrate independence day at all because what have we even got to be independent of anymore? We're dependent on our markets. We're slaves to the very lifestyle our forefathers dreamt we could have, and what to the slave is the fourth of July?
What ever happened to manifest destiny? We set out from our homes and braved the wild frontier. We blazed trails from the dust with hooves, and wagon wheels, and eventually tears in the march of the century, and it was a century of dishonor, but we didn't care because we were brave. We had direction. We tore east to west from sea to shining sea across America the beautiful and wrote an entire culture of stories from our blistered barefoot prints in the sand.
We killed our brothers in a Georgia field four score and seven years after their fathers fired the shot heard around the world, and it flew back around the world again to blow Kennedy's mind another hundred years after that, because it doesn't matter what you're willing to sacrifice for your country when you get in the way of the old men who run it. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what your country has done to you.
Our own sons and daughters more than anyone else. Our own volunteers more than us ourselves when they say that in the Army the pay is mighty fine. They give you a hundred dollars and they take back ninety-nine. And it's no lie, that they get the short end of the big stick - no matter how softly or loudly they speak. That no matter how quickly they would rush to do for their country and to take arms against our enemies they will only continue be cannon fodder to the men who see only whats to gain from the enemy.
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.
But I don't see it happening because so long as there's a profit to be had in the debt of our subjugated opponents, the Caissons will call and the carrions will fall upon the heroes of our era when they cannot bear their arms anymore.
And we had a dream under a sky yet to be dimmed by the glow of a thousand cities, sputnik twinkling round and round as it hurdled overhead while Nat King Cole sang us to sleep in our beds with white picket fences lining quiet drives in the moonlight after "This is Walter Kronkite, CBS News; Goodnight."
We dreamt of a future with rocket cars and rocket this and rocket that, the vast emptiness of space was still our wildest new frontier, and not yet a meer description of what lay between our ears.
We were confident until by the rockets and red scare, and duck-and-cover if bombs are bursting in air led a generation to a ware we would not honor. A war that changed everything one sunny November morning in a rice field far from home. From Hanoi to Saigon, we pushed forth and fought on until Minh and Mao, somewhere, somehow, East of Lao, brought to its knees the bravest nation up to now.
Face it, fellas, we lost and lost sore. We were Tet Offended.
And ever since its been a struggle because in our age, we have so much more to fear than fear itself.
The dream is over.
It's time to wake up.
It's morning in America. This is our reality now, And it's dismal.
Our hopes and our fantasies shot beyond the limit of the sky and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.
Well I want them back. I want us to fight for more than crude oil and foreign soil.
I want us to fight for something we believe in again.
I want us to believe in something real again.
Because I too have a dream.
I have a dream where one day I can wake up in a nation where the flag means more than just the sacrifices of our great grandfather's sons, where patriotism has less to do with blindness to our faults and more to do with fondness for one another, where we salute out of pride and not out of habit.
I have a dream where old soldiers die, but they NEVER fade away.
I have a dream where words like "ignorance" and "bigotry" do not describe the downfall of a generation, but where words like "respect" and "dignity" are more than just dusted antiques traded for the stylized knock-off personalities of smug kids and young thugs the way we traded the sound for the beat.
I have a dream where we don't delude ourselves morally by using words like "legitimate" and "rape" in the same sentence.
I have a dream where two men who love each other can share a ring that doesn't vibrate, and a woman has more right to choose than old men wielding pens like swords in an act of war committed in the name of a book of love.
I have a dream where Uncle Sam's hat isn't full of spare change by a dumpster while he weeps into the tattered remains of a get-up that inspired an era.
I have a dream. Where our political culture is no longer defined by the image of two burning buildings against a smokey September sky.
Yes, I have a dream.
And so long as I've tears to weep and blood to shed, I will carry it with me in my heart.
Because ladies and gentlemen. The American dream may be over.
But the stars and stripes are forever.