Ashley Elizabeth Miller

“We are all depressed because we’re told, we assume, happiness is expected,” conceded Tony Soprano.

How do you see The American Dream? I envision the ad for the FX Sitcom “American Dad” (without the odd alien fellow) or a tristate area white family of four: a heterosexual, handsome duo with a son on the football team and a daughter who listens to Springsteen. I see the domestic species stand outside their yellow neighborhood home on the end of a culdesac in front of a manicured lawn and white picket fence with a stupid little flag poking from a mailbox chute; they’re so desperate to belong.

As Americans, we’re free, sure. We are free to adhere to the societal guidelines already in play. Romantic poet John Keats translated this sensation into sonnets, imploring his audience to see one must sustain pain to ascend to maturity.

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pain and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

Albert Camus would this an encounter with the absurd, an existential epiphany when one sees oneself in relation to others. The person can then become a soul or a soldier. A soul is an artist who rejects the norm and seeks truth through individual experience. Soldiers are a different story. They are malleable blobs eager to follow whoever’s loudest. “A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything,” Malcolm X said.

Simone de Beauvoir knew this. Sartre, too, knew this: hell is other people, the gaze of the other. Here, Ralph Waldo Emmerson would say, is where one must embrace individuality to change the ecosystem for the next generation. “To be great is to be misunderstood.” 

Here’s to us all spreading our own unique spark.