THEME: We Are The American Dream
•This wasn’t supposed to be quite so easy. After an engaging morning of talks and conversations with Senators, media leaders, journalists, founders of nonprofit organizations, a popular pastor, a University President and a Major General in the US Army … finding common themes should have been hard. After all, today’s topic of economic mobility must surely have lots of different ideologies and solutions. Division has become a cornerstone of any sort of political conversation, with all forms of government seemingly lined up on either side of any debate. Agreement itself has become a form of surrender.
Yet speaking with some of these amazing personalities, finding a theme was actually easy … and that is good news for all of us. Everyone, in some way, was living the ideal of the American dream that they wanted to help bring back to our national economy. Some speakers are immigrants themselves, having left the land of their birth to find new success in America. Others came from modest means and grew beyond their environment to achievements on a national scale. This is not a trivial discovery.
In the long lasting words of John F. Kennedy, we are uncovering again that “what unites us is far greater than what divides us.” The truth behind this extends to the hundreds of participants in the room and the virtual participants online through Twitter and the LiveStream as well. We are all living the shared American dream, and reminding ourselves of that fact is more important than ever.
