The American Dream and the Economic Myth

This provocative essay by Betty Sue Flowers examines the limitations and deeper opportunities of the economic myth which governs our society today. It asks how we might articulate a common good through which we might treat each other as citizens and not just consumers. We are challenged to imagine ourselves anew: “We can't hold up a myth of community and wait for it to take hold. We have to work within our own myth, however impoverished it seems to us. To deepen the American Dream is to engage the imagination—to create better stories of who we are and who we might become.”