Dreams: Do They Come True?

by Madeleine Kando

I like to write because it beats talking to myself in my head all the time. And it’s always nicer to think that someone out there is reading your writing. I mean: I could write a diary like I used to when I was a young girl. But then no one would read it. My twin sister and I used to hide our diaries so that we wouldn’t know each other’s secrets. The trick was to pretend that you hadn’t read each other’s diaries, but of course you knew every little detail. But now my twin sister is far too busy to be interested in my thoughts. I am lucky if my little dog Max watches my moving fingers on the keyboard as I type. I have this fantasy that one day, after I am dead and gone my children will find my writing in a dusty box by accident. ‘Oh, my God’ they would exclaim with regret, ‘Look at all the stuff mom wrote. I had nooo idea.’ That’s a fantasy of mine, to be discovered posthumously. After I have turned to dust. Then I’ll show them how smart I was, how interesting. They will posthumously bemoan the fact that they never read my brilliant essays.

So, yes, I post my brilliant essays on this blog. Of course it’s a bit cowardly because I don’t know who will read my stuff. If they like it, that’s good. And if they don’t like it? Well, I don’t know who it is that doesn’t like it. So it’s a cowardly way of escaping criticism, isn’t it.

But enough said about my motives for writing. I am getting dangerously close to one of those people who spend 90 minutes presenting a 3 mintue speech. What I really wanted to say is this:

I am from Europe. I am an immigrant. I came here as a young adult with so many dreams, so much hope. I came and conquered the promised land. Yes, every immigrant has that feeling. Even though this country has been ‘conquered’ a long time ago, as an individual immigrant, you are the first one to arrive. I was happy to be in a place where I could explore, invent myself, not conform.

But now, after all this time, I don’t know. I look back at the country that I left. Or to be more precise, the continent that I left and I am not so sure whether my immigration has actually improved my life.

I feel like someone from Marocco who moves to Holland because they cannot survive in their own country. They spend a lifetime there, raising a family, adapting to a new land, sacrificing their emotional ties to their own culture. And then, one day they discover that their own country is actually a lot better off economically, culturally and otherwise. So why on earth did they emigrate?

The bottom line is that I think America is in deep trouble. This vast and beautiful country is slowly turning into one of those third world countries that people used to leave to COME to America. I hope that most of you will see this analogy as an exaggeration of the facts. Or am I onto something? Is this country moving so far to the right that it has become inhospitable to the middle class, that we will start seeing a mass exodus to greener pastures?

Wouldn’t that be a shame. After all, nothing has changed since I came. The mountains, the prairies, the people are still the same. With a little common sense, we could go back to rebuilding a nation that is good for the average person, not just for the very lucky few.
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