What's the Dream Today?

I grew up believing that the U.S. is a melting-pot. A place where people from different places and cultures, of different skin colors came together. A people whose identity lay not in clan, tribe or race; but in our shared belief in some core principles: That all men are created equal and endowed by our Creator with "certain unalienable rights". My parents and teachers affirmed that what made me American was my buy-in to a common culture valuing liberty, duty, and advancement on merit.

This dream of America, was still evolving - painfully at times - even in the 1960s. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream, "that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. " was within sight if only we'd keep marching.

King clarified the context of his dream. "It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream."

The signs in the march supporting illegal immigrants here in Phoenix show a group of people whose dream isn't rooted in the American dream, but in something else entirely. Those signs reflected the antithesis of Dr. King's dream, and the American dream. They glorified Aztlan, Chicanos, and "La Raza". These are all terms of division, of sub-group identification based on skin-color, declaring a rejection of a shared, American dream. The focus of the protesters is on skin-color, on the mythical pre-historic Eden called Aztlan in Chicano folklore.

I ask this: Hasn't the American dream, with it's flaws, served to preserve and protect the dignity of more human beings than any other set of core values? What is the Aztlan dream? What great ideas does it offer to unite and serve a people?

Friends, Aztlan is a train wreck. It's a mythology embraced by intellectually mush-minded multiculturalists. It melds Aztec folklore of a nebulous pre-historic motherland with a sense of Mexican national victimhood regarding territory sold and ceded to the U.S. by the government of Mexico- no friend itself to Aztlan, having been established as a one-time European colony, "stealing" the territory from native people as U.S. acquisitions from Mexico via legal treaty in 1846 never did. Got an axe to grind? March on Mexico City.

If the condition of Mexico today reflects Aztlan's core principles, what does that tell us? Anyone want to move south to get in on that dream? Oh, come on, crippling poverty, rampant corruption, squalor and intestinal parasites aren't your bag? Ahh, yes, we've come to the whole point. Aztlan offers no hope. People are flooding out of that nasty neverland and into America, a place created by a set of values that actually work - offering hope, liberty, and jobs.

America has room for legal immigration, but please, please, leave your Aztlan at the door, we've got something better cooking here, and you won't need to wash it down with a course of antibiotics.

Dr. King admonished, "In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred." The throngs in Phoenix, Denver, L.A. and other cities didn't just drink from the cup, they're bombed on bitterness.

Finally, Martin painted a vision of hope, "With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day." The protesters this spring had nothing comparable, no positive vision at all. That isn't the America I know.

Today, I say, "Come, legally, to our country. Learn our language out of the same respect for other people's nation and culture I had on a one-week visit to Italy. Let's work, pray, struggle, and stand up TOGETHER, as we pursue the AMERICAN dream (legally).