From Where It Came (The American Dream #1)

I vaguely remember people

during the late 1950s to the early 1960s

talking about the American Dream,

usually on television,

sometimes teachers and neighbors,

or read in the Saturday Evening Post.

Norman Rockwell’s paintings reflected 

something of what people really did and believed,

from summer time, to holidays, to the Four Freedoms.

I wanted to be like those people in his paintings,

strong, happy, and contented—and also live 

the life of the Hardy Boys or Walter Mitty— 

until President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963

and Rockwell’s heartbreaking 1964 painting 

of six-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted 

to school by federal marshals.

It was the terrible things 

people did to one another 

now made very public,

very present, that awakened so many.

It was nothing new for many Americans.

For them it was the same old bigotry, 

the same racism, the same meanness 

and violence they had lived with for generations.

And still people kept coming.

But being the fifteen-year-old kid that I was— 

white, middle class, naïve— 

I ignored the dissonance of nearly everything, 

yet I was vaguely ashamed, feeling like I lacked 

the courage of that six-year-old child.

From: Searching For Donna Reed,

Norman Rockwell, & The American Dream

Unpub. MS #1 of 5