Chasing the Sun

Whilst flying on my way to a much-needed vacation, a sobering experience caught my attention. Upon leaving the ground in Chicago, the sun was nearly setting; however, as the plane I was in reached thirty-seven thousand feet, the sun was in fact higher in the sky than it had been ten minutes previously, the product of placing the horizon much lower on the plane of sight between my window and the distant star. As I flew west, chasing the setting sun, it still dropped towards the horizon with such a serene note of inevitability that I could not help but contemplate the metaphor it represented.

It is the 2009th year of our Lord. Barrack Obama is president, and the economy is still deep within the slums it reached the previous year. The American Dream, that effusive lust for a slice of the wealth and glamour we were promised by simple virtue of our existence in this rotting nation, seems all the more unattainable for our financial woes. Yet still we plow on, certain that our break is just around the corner. The dream that we all share, the longing for a life above our current one, is the driving force behind our vain, capitalistic endeavors – and it drives us with the whip, biting at us should we falter, cracking down upon our heads with all the force of a banker's ample stomach.

This goal, this American Dream, this dystopia of lust and romance and filthy cash, is the sun. It is what we chase, day in and day out, through endless cycles of despair and heartbreak. Each day we bite down on the bullet, waiting for the time to come when we load that bullet to signal our cessation from the unified dream. Yet in the continuance of the metaphor, there are those who finally reach the sun; as would happen in reality, those people would soon find their beautifully glowing star to be an inferno of chaos, a maelstrom of fiery destruction visited upon them until nothing remains but free-floating hydrogen and a vague regret of simpler times. Those who reach their goal burn in whatever sense of the word seems most fitting; to be certain, some thrive – yet is the actuality of their dream anything but a pale specter of their preconceptions?

As I flew threw the air, thinking thoughts as no man should ever have the time to indulge, the sun finally set. Darkness settled slowly but surely across the land, blanketing my eyes in a thick deluge of impenetrable black. This is the true end of the American Dream, the one that devours its proponents and detractors alike. A lifetime of struggle, sacrifice, and vain wishing offers no solace to the man who is dying, suffocating in the darkness of his own despair. The dream is simply that; the whimsical emanations of a mind too unstimulated to satisfy its own nightly desires for activity. Darkness falls with an inevitability that is neither retractable nor satisfying to all but the most morbid and suicidal amongst us – and who can say what they truly feel in the face of such terrifying and overwhelming futility?

As the pushers of lotteries state: buy yourself a dream. This is America; we pay our lives and our loves for nothing but the chance to gaze upon the distant sun, telling ourselves with such a damnable surety that money, women, and happiness wait upon its surface, freely available if they can but stretch out a touch more, reaching with that barest trace of increased vigor. Yet when payment is due, it is the loss of a life wasted in ignominy that the reaper demands. Even those who embrace the temporary warmth of the sun waste away into emptiness, leaving nothing more substantial than a regret and a corpse. Welcome to America, land of the Golden Dream.