the american dream

Talking to my French classmates, I've gathered that the American Dream has become a rather stereotyped idea in this country. Of course, the same goes in America -- but it's especially interesting to talk to French people about it because that dream just does not exist here. I might be sounding ridiculous because, of course, it is the American dream. But, until coming here, I didn't realize how much that type of American mindset actually affects my outlook on the world. It is only when talking to my European friends about the choices and independence that Americans have that I become conscious of how patriotic I must sound.

I'm not making much sense here, but when reading this description from the NYT's Roger Cohen, a light bulb went off in my head:

Nobody in their right mind would give up the manifold sensual, aesthetic and gastronomic pleasures offered by French savoir-vivre for the unrelenting battlefield of American ambition were it not for one thing: possibility.

You know possibility when you breathe it. For an immigrant, it lies in the ease of American identity and the boundlessness of American horizons after the narrower confines of European nationhood and the stifling attentions of the European nanny state, which has often made it more attractive not to work than to work. High French unemployment was never much of a mystery.

Americans, at least in their imaginations, have always lived at the new frontier; French frontiers have not shifted much in centuries.

What they say is true -- once you go abroad, you become exponentially more patriotic. I've had to defend myself against preconceptions of Americans as an ignorant, stupid people who only care about themselves. Generalizations like this get me pretty riled up, and I find myself being more gung-ho America! than I've ever been in my life. But it's because I really believe in Cohen's American possibility, and I think my fervor for it lately is evidence of that.