Across the pond

When I began this blog in August 2006 I did not have a clear idea of what I wanted to do. But then, neither did those who started the first newspapers, and those who start, or change, newspapers now. So I decided to get it up and running now. And let it change with the times. And as a result of my exerience in writing it.

The last time I changed the top headline to ‘Views from the other side of the pond’ was when I realised I was writing most of my blogs about the US Presidential election. Since the inauguration I have written little about it, although I remain as interested in ever in US politics.

The new headline popped into my head this morning when I awoke from a half-remembered dream:

For those who follow their dreams

Today’s America was created by those Europeans who dreamed of a better world and set off in small boats to found it on the other side of the ‘pond’, which at the time of the Pilgrim Fathers was a vast and stormy ocean. Today it has been reduced to the size of a pond, because you can fly over it in five hours and at a cost not much more than it costs to fly to Glasgow.

So the Pilgrim Fathers, and the thousands of poor Europeans, who made the same journey in the nineteenth century, were ‘dreamers’, but they also men and women who were prepared to take the risks and endure the hardships of making their dreams a reality.

So ‘The American Dream’ embraces idealism and the pragmatism which is one of the outstanding national charateristics of the America we know today.

Barack Obama built his campaign on the ‘I have a dream’ speech by Martin Luther King over fifty years ago. That appeal was initially most successful with America’s youth. But as the battle developed more and more of the oldies were converted.

By the time he was inaugurated his approval ratings in America and in the world had soared. Desite the realities of global warming and the growing evidence of a recession worse than any since the 1930s he provided everyone with a reason to be hopeful.

As George Bernard Shaw wrote:

‘The world has need of men who dream of how things never were, and ask, Why Not.’