The Myth of the American Dream: Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety, and Power

by D.L. Mayfield

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of the separate holy experience is a dream. . . . And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around like the sun.1 He goes on to write that monks live in the same broken world, the world of the atomic bomb, of race hatred, mass media, technology, and so on. The difference is that monks are conscious that they belong to God, but the truth is—everybody belongs to God. Why should they consider themselves different or better? “Thank God, thank God,” he wrote, “that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.”