trying to decide if i really wanna make a thought spill thread Right Now about my thoughts on the nature of the american dream

im listenign to brennan's lore dump which is like. cool and all and nod keeps talking about how the "american dream" in this world needs to be kept ephemeral and to have multiple meanings. THAT BEING SAID. i kinda disagree w brennan lol

well not even necessarily that i disagree with brennan, because i have no way of knowing if this is what he truly believes. but it is a theme in the story and, for lack of a better phrasing, it's the argument he's making. and i have Thoughts(tm)

anyway i think we as americans have this common conception of america being founded as a place of refuge and opportunity where everyone can find a better life. and its not necessarily wrong, because that is how a lot of ppl perceive and talk about the US

i do think it's a somewhat modern conception. in Ye Olde Days when us white ppl first started "immigrating" to the US, it was a colonial venture just as much if not more than it was about escaping religious persecution

AND even as colonists arrived in the US looking for better opportunities and a better life and refuge, we built a settler-colonial nation. our white ancestors' desires for the "american dream" as defined in tuc actively interfered with the lives of indigenous north americans

and nowadays when pp talk about the american dream, it so often comes in conversations about immigrants of color, especially from south and central america, who come to the US. and that isn't to discount the hopes and goals of ppl who do come to the US looking for a better life

but it also doesn't change the fact that we started as a predominantly white, slave-owning, colonizing power, and that the "american dream" that the first white americans dreamed of killed millions of indigenous people

i dont like the way i phrased that last tweet, we're still a colonizing power, and predominantly white (when it comes to power in this country). that shit didn't go away. honestly slavery...... didn't really go away either it just shifted forms to the prison industrial complex

UHH ANYWAY. not to discount the american dream as brennan portrays it in tuc, because i think that's a real conception of the US that a lot of people hold, and held in the past. but i think half of it is wishful thinking on the part of us americans, to believe that we are a just

and good nation that will provide refuge and freedom to all, when in practice that's not what our history is. and the other thing is that, the american dream of "the masses" and the dream of people who held power (white, cishet, rich men) are different

i would bet real actual money that if i time traveled back a few hundred years and asked thomas jefferson what he thought "the american dream" might be, he wouldn't be talking about freedom and rights for all, is what im kinda saying lol

AND THOSE DREAMS CAN COEXIST. and tuc is really about "the masses'" dream more than the dream of the colonial state. but i can't separate the two in my mind. so watching tuc and getting all this lore about the american dream in brennan's world is..... not rankling me? but jarring

it's not my story blah blah but my first instinct is always to go "but wait". i'm enjoying tuc so far and i'm excited to see where it goes and how these themes come back around. but the "american dream" is definitely something we as americans look at with rose tinted glasses