"Here is the grand vision I suggest Americans can pursue: the right of all citizens to larger lives. Not to get richer than the next guy or necessarily to accumulate more and more stuff but the right to live life more fully and engage more expansively the elemental possibilities of human existence.."
"As Franklin Roosevelt understood, Americans will postpone immediate gratification and endure hard sacrifices--if they must--so long as they are convinced the future can be better than the past. But we face a far more difficult problem at our moment in history. What do you promise people who have been told they can have anything they want, who are repeatedly congratulated for living in the best of all possible circumstances? How do you tell them "the good times," as we have known them, are not coming back? Americans need a new vision that helps them deal with reality, a promising story of the future that helps them let go of the past..."
to read William Greider's article published in: The Nation, May 6, 2009, click on
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090525/greider/print?rel=nofollow
RELATED LINK:
"IS THERE NO END TO DISASTER CAPITALISM?" Elizabeth Warren, Naomi Klein and William Greider on The Charlie Rose Show
http://www.charlierose.com/view/clip/10296
Original: The Future of the American Dream