in the movie "The Big Chill" during the funeral scene when the preacher asked, "Are not the satisfactions of being a good man among our common men great enough to sustain us any more? Where did Alex's hope go? Maybe that is the small resolution we can take from here today. To try to regain that hope that must have eluded Alex."

I think about my grandparents and their generation - 2 of my grandparents are alive and in their 90's now. And for them, the satisfactions of being a good man were and are enough to sustain them. I watched that sense of satisfaction start slipping away in my parents generation, and now here in mine, it seems to be utterly gone.

I also think that the America my grandparents were young in has changed in that the world, the country, the place we have created is no longer supportive of such satisfactions. Yet, that is a chicken and egg scenario - which shift came first, the structural or the individual. Regardless, we have created a place that is very hard to walk through with grace.

Perhaps the "how" can be answered better once America re-establishes an identity for itself, for it is difficult to be a part of something greater than yourself when you have no idea what that something is. In other words, when we are trying to define the new American Dream, I think what needs to happen first is the definition of American.