The American Dream!  What does that mean?  There’s two stories I’m going to direct you to and both are very different. 

The first is about a conversation an Army Major had with an Afghani about religion.  This shows how wide the divide can be in understanding just what freedom means.

Afghanistan without a clue relates a letter Maj. Apple sent to his family (be sure to read about halfway down the post):

snip….First, Afghans do not have the slightest inkling of what religious freedom is all about. Daily, I have to explain what it is. “So”, an Afghan says, “how does your government teach you how to pray?” I say, “Um, they don’t, most of us learn from our parents.”

Christy from Common Sense America tells us about her life and how she battled against the odds to beat poverty and welfare to live the American Dream.  She’s got an incredible story of determination and challenge. 

Unfortunately this is not a fictional story or something I have to make up to provoke liberals. This was my life. If you weren’t raised in the shame of poverty, you may never understand. Unless you have lived in poverty, you will never know. You will never know the feeling of wanting to become invisible as your perfectly able-bodied mother hands the store clerk food stamps for a cart full of junk food – a clerk that is looking from the cart to your mom and back with her raised eyebrow of judgment. You will never know the shame of listening to your mother threaten relatives by saying that if they don’t give her money, again, it will be their fault that her kids starve. You will never know the embarrassment of never having a new dress, new socks, or even essentials such as electricity and phone service because mom had ‘other things’ to do with the welfare check. You will never know the shame of lying to friends by saying that the phone lines must have been down when they tried to call. You will never know the humiliation of taking out your sack lunch at school, knowing that you only have two pieces of bread with nothing in-between them but yet your pride makes you pretend you are eating a sandwich just like everyone else. You will never know the constant feeling of abandonment, envy, hopelessness, sadness, and shame. You will never know the prayers, the tears, the fear, and the heartbreaks.

I know them intimately. They were my childhood.