Dreaming Like an Immigrant

Dream of a better future.

This has long been the American way, and it's what attracts immigrants to this country, away from places where they dare not dream at all, because no better future seems possible at all.

I'm hardly oblivious to this, when I talk or write about the shrinking prospects of "middle-class" Americans.

Those of us caught between the poverty line and the wealthy class are the ones being squeezed, both by internal economic forces inside the U.S. and the external pressures of globalization.

Therefore, our sense of despair deepens.

Meanwhile, immigrants continue to arrive, just as my grandparents did the better part of a century ago.

Today's newest Americans take jobs that we don't, start businesses that we wouldn't, and buy houses we overlook.

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To once again thrive in America, perhaps we have to relearn how to dream like an immigrant. Thinking like a middle-class person when there is no longer a reasonable chance of living a middle-class lifestyle is becoming downright foolish.

Of course, many people have careers and assets that insulate them from this discussion. They are not struggling in the creative arts, trying to live in places like San Francisco while pursuing what might be called a non-profit lifestyle.

Yet, downward-mobile writers and artists and musicians remain, in my view, far more important to the health of our society than our society perhaps generally recognizes.

Money rules. Therefore bankers, insurance companies, lawyers and others who feed off of the financial world's entrails continue to live a life of riches.

But those whose lives are devoted to creativity are no longer welcome in the halls of the comfortable. We have been downgraded, like a municipal bond in a debt-laden city.

We were tolerated during a period of excess; now we have become excess baggage. Of course they would miss us if we left them without their readings, their paintings, their music, but (in their view) we, the artists, have always been expendable as long as our art remains behind...

Regardless of this, we do face a new set of choices -- to leave these places to the super rich and the very poor, and move to the interior, if family and professional obligations allow us that much flexibility, for an example.

As a child of the Midwest, I've long known I would be comfortable returning there, or to a closer venue like the Northwest or the Southwest or Florida -- all places I enjoy -- except that I am still raising relatively young children, so that kind of relocation is precluded for now.

A more intriguing option would be to start thinking like an immigrant. What would my grandfather do?

Stay tuned.

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