American Dream is more than just what we own

Many people still alive remember the time when the United States of America was known as the "land of the free and the home of the brave."

Some will even remember when the "American Dream" wasn't about getting rich or owning a business, but just doing well enough to have a home and a family and some leisure time to enjoy life.

People pretty much got to choose how much they wanted to succeed. If they were satisfied to work hard enough to support their family and not much more, that was OK. If they wanted to work hard enough to become a big success, they could try that too.

We had yet to become the Consumer Society, where our worth was based on how much we owned and how often we gobbled up the newest televisions, or computers, or cars.

1938

We had yet to learn the glories of consumer debt.

People bought things after saving for them. The idea of "buy now, pay later" came along after World War II, and bank cards -- essentially revolving loans -- were a generation further in the future.

When the troops came home from Europe and the Pacific, and when rationing ended, folks who hadn't been able to buy anything for four years all of a sudden splurged.

And all of a sudden we were off to the races, acquiring possessions at nosebleed speed and not even really asking ourselves whether each new thing we owned was actually making our lives better.

When my parents were first married, they were on a tight budget. Each payday, they cashed their checks and put money into envelopes for each of the bills they had to pay.

The first envelope was always savings. Whether it was $5 or only $2, they always saved something.


And one other thing. No credit cards.

You might be surprised how many of their generation -- the Greatest Generation -- never borrowed money except for mortgages on their homes.

One thing they didn't do was buy every upgrade on every new electronic toy. I don't think my parents ever bought either a big screen TV or a high definition one. The first television I ever owned was a 13-inch RCA portable in 1975. That was the size and type of TV I had until 1991, when I got a 27-inch Sony.

Around the end of the century, I got an HD television, a 37-inch Toshiba. A couple of 42-inch Vizios later, a year ago at Christmas I got what I hope will be my last TV. It's a UHD 55-inch Samsung with a curved screen.

Why mention this?

My final TV? A UHD 55-inch Samsung, curved screen

It's not bragging. The point I'm trying to make is that except for the first time I stepped up to a bigger screen and the first time we got High Def, I never really noticed that much difference.

I have a video game system -- a PS4 -- that I got at Christmas three years ago. I've even got the virtual reality add-ons and some games that should work pretty well with that.

Oddly, although I hooked the entire system up a few months back, I have still never tried even once to play it.


Still, I will someday, and my system is much less obtrusive than something I saw for sale this past Christmas season for the first time.

Rather than describe it, I'll show you.

It's somewhere between half and two-thirds the size of a regular arcade game. An adult standing at it might need to scrunch down a little.

Don't get me wrong. I would never buy this, even though it retails for just $299. For one thing, I wouldn't want to play one game all the time.

For another, the only room in the house my wife would allow it is my office, which is already overcrowded with wonderful stuff. I have enough for my walls and shelves that if I took out everything in the room now, I would have enough in the garage to completely furnish the room with different things.

The noise would be annoying too.

The thing that saddens me a little is that so much of what I have -- so many of the things I worked to assemble -- won't be wanted by my children when I die. It isn't that it's not good stuff. No, it's more that both Pauline and Virgile and their families move every two or three years and really can't be amassing a lot of possessions.

Will they want my complete collections of Peanuts, Bloom County, the Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes? Or my sets of Little Orphan Annie and Pogo?

Or my collection of 130 or so autographed baseballs, with several dozen Hall of Famers and nearly half of the All-Century Team selected in 1999?

It's strange. I have a much more comfortable life than I deserve -- house that's paid for, good insurance, decent monthly income -- because I have a wife who was truly a high achiever.

So whatever I didn't accomplish or didn't save, at least I married well.

That's my American Dream.