Mount Timpanogos in Orem, Utah. Photo: arbyreed
When the towers fell, I was in Ms. Schultz world history class. I was in the eighth grade, the last year of “middle school” for where I’m from in Kansas City. There was an announcement over the intercom and Ms. Schultz’s face dropped. She was a small lady, in her sixties, whose ever-ebullient energy stood tall above her miniature frame; to see that energy dissipate as it did was the first sign that this was serious. We began talking among each other, a handful of us escorted out to respond to phone calls in the administrative offices, as Ms. Schultz turned on the television and searched for the news. Then she found it.
“BREAKING NEWS: PLANE CRASHES INTO WORLD TRADE CENTER”
The thing is, back then — and this might be the first time I have ever admitted it, even to myself — I didn’t know what was happening. And, quite frankly, I didn’t care. I was a kid from Kansas whose life was focused to five miles each side of the Kansas-Missouri border and whose appreciation for America was more aligned with the Dream Team, not obstinate values. I knew what the World Trade Center was, but didn’t fully understand what an attack on the Twin Towers meant. Beyond that, I didn’t think I knew anyone affected (even though I eventually learned that I did, including family). So instead of embodying the shock and scare I saw on a couple friends’ faces whose fathers or mothers did business in New York, I became angry. I beat my chest. I grit my teeth. I bared my hate. And all in the name of pride and these aforementioned values I did not understand.
But that was then. 14 years later, after several confusing wars and countless more attacks, both foreign and domestic, September 11, 2001 holds a different significance for me: it represents a rallying cry around the American Dream and against anyone who stands in the way of that American Dream for everyone, citizen or immigrant or refugee.
In its current iterations, the Dream is complicated, shrouded by entitlement at one end and uncertainty at the other. But it its most basic state, the Dream is simple: to fulfill the pursuit of one’s desires or passions — it is the supposed fundamental right to have the opportunity to succeed or fail in doing so, nothing more. To realize said Dream is an accomplishment in and of itself, but the American Dream, at least in the earlier forms that gave birth to not only the idea but its namesake — take revolution or, more specifically, the Gold Rush — represents the chase. And it is a chase we snowboarders or skiers or climbers or surfers or paddlers or fishermen or paragliders are all familiar with.
Popularized by 20th-century writer and historian James Truslow Adams, the most widely referenced passage, from the 1931 book The Epic of America, goes:
But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement… It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.
The American Dream is at once what made and makes America both great and puts it at odds with itself. The greatness, as the truths to our Declaration of Independence, is self-evident. How does it put America at odds with itself? For that, all you need to do is turn on your computer. See the anger. See the chest-beating. See the teeth-gritting. See the hate.
And what is ultimately the most discouraging of all this anger, chest-beating, teeth-gritting, and hate is that we are all chasing the same end game: freedom, whether it be freedom from societal and personal pressures or freedom from structural and systematic confines. Hopefully, that is an end game we might all get behind and, in turn, celebrate.
September 11 will forever be a day that we remember the people who lost their lives or livelihoods as a result of unconscionable tragedy. But it should also be a day that we celebrate the American Dream, the passions and pursuits of the highest peaks and furthest waves and, simply put, greatness.
