Thank You for the Dream, President Bush

In President Bush's State of the Union Address he ended his speech with: "As Franklin Roosevelt once reminded Americans, "each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth."

And we live in the country where the biggest dreams are born. The abolition of slavery was only a dream -- until it was fulfilled. The liberation of Europe from fascism was only a dream -- until it was achieved. The fall of imperial communism was only a dream -- until, one day, it was accomplished. Our generation has dreams of its own, and we also go forward with confidence. The road of Providence is uneven and unpredictable -- yet we know where it leads: It leads to freedom."

This President is a man who makes dreams come true, not only for imprisoned nations but for people imprisoned in another kind of hell.

Imagine you're a man, six feet, seven inches tall, but you don't have the ability to communicate. You are subject to fits because your world will suddenly spin out of control, putting strange colors before your eyes and odd noises in your ears. Sometimes it's so disorienting that you cry out and hit your head with your hand, hoping to make it go away. Doctors have used terms, meaningless to you but wrenching to your family, like "autism" and "severely retarded" and "temporal lobe epilepsy."

This has been going on all your life. You've had to work hard to make sense of the strange sounds people make at you. Sometimes words don't sound the same way the second time you hear them and that's even more confusing. Sometimes sounds and colors get all mixed up in your head and the confusion terrifies you, so you burst into tears. Sometimes you're terribly afraid and your response to that is to bite one hand while you hit your head with the other. Other times a sudden rush of emotion overwhelms you and you begin to laugh and cry all at once.

You are blind in your right eye and deaf in that ear from hitting yourself over the years. Doctors have said that you are strong enough now to blind yourself in the other eye or even cause permanent brain damage or death with a self-inflicted blow.

There have been people all around you in your life who have tried to understand and help but only since you've been an adult have you begun to understand love.

The dreams you dream confuse you and sometimes you wake crying. You don't have a dream for your future. Even your parents, who have loved you and helped you all your life, have never dreamed a dream for you. They have hoped only to see you happy.

Through most of your adult life you've lived in rented houses, with a staff who look after you 24-hours a day. As it would happen, for one reason or another and no fault of yours, homeowners have wanted their houses back on an average of every other year.

Nothing upsets and confuses you any more than change -- especially moving. But move you did, 6 times in 12 years.

Then along came President Bush. President Bush decided that everyone, no matter what their circumstances, should have part of the American Dream -- homeownership.

President Bush doesn't know about you. He probably doesn't know much about people like you. But, without even knowing it, President Bush dreamed the impossible dream for you -- and made it come true.

Suddenly it became possible for you to buy a house. Your income from social security and disability is less than $8,000.00 a year but thanks to a US Department of Agriculture 502 loan (for low-income individuals to buy rural property) you are able to buy your very own home.

And on October 25, 2004 you moved in. Your astonished, delighted and grateful parents put up a website for your distant siblings to see how the purchase and move were going at www.angelfire.com/tn3/tiedemannvols.

You don't really understand the difference now but you seem happy and content. Your world is as stable and safe as your parents can make it. You're surrounded by love and you are living the American Dream.

If you could, you would thank President Bush with all your heart but since you can't, your parents thank him with all theirs.