"American Dreamland " Bonus Episode

Welcome, Rootsland gang, to our Independence Day Dreamland version of the show.

Dreamland version?

Yeah, dreamland.

Just stick around.

All will be revealed.

Oh, yeah.

Happy Independence Day to you, Sia.

Happy Independence Day, everyone.

So, as a little girl growing up in the countryside of Jamaica, did you have any thoughts on America?

It's a land of opportunity.

That's where we go to get rich.

Did you ever think you'd come here?

Yeah, because my dad lived there.

My dad was up here.

And when you finally came up here, what do you think?

Well, I thought it was beautiful.

You know, I thought it was everything I ever imagined because I read a lot, so I was in awe when I came.

Also because I went to Disney World.

That was one of the first places I went.

I remember that Disney trip.

And what about the American Dream?

What does that mean to you?

What it meant was a better life.

Meant.

Why?

What does it mean now?

Working to survive.

Well, you're not alone.

I know there's a lot of people who feel that way right now.

And, you know, Sia, when I'm not in the studio, I'm on the streets, on the corners.

You know, there's a lot of negativity out there.

People saying the American dream is dead.

It is dead.

When you were just working to survive, hand to mouth.

No, I don't think the American dream is dead.

I think it's just hiding.

Yeah, well, it feels dead to me.

A dream wants to know you're committed before it's willing to give itself to you.

It's like a new crush.

Play is hard to get.

It's elusive.

But once it does, a dream is for life.

It's an interesting way to look at it.

Is that the kind of chat I felt for when I was younger?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, you fell hook, line and sinker, baby.

At least you was always an optimist.

I still am.

So I thought this would be a great time to tell a story, to remind everyone dreams really never die.

They outlive us all.

Broadcasting live and direct from the rolling red hills on the outskirts of Kingston, Jamaica, from a magical place at the intersection of words, sound, and power.

The red light is on.

Your dial is set, the frequency in tune to the Roots Land Podcast stories that are music to your ears.

There is a special kind of anticipation that belongs only to childhood.

The sleepless excitement before your trip to your favorite restaurant.

When dreams taste like French fries and chocolate milkshakes, when tomorrow feels like Christmas morning, wrapped in the promise of a cheeseburger.

You know the feeling.

So many of Us do.

It's written into the DNA of growing up in America, this ritual of family dining that becomes a cornerstone of memory.

I remember being that child, pestering my parents with the relentless enthusiasm that only a 7 year old can muster.

Can we go to the diner, please?

When?

Tomorrow.

Today.

The night before our visits, I'd lie in bed constructing elaborate fantasies around that corner booth.

The one where the light hits just right, casting everything in a golden glow that made even the condiment bottles look magical.

I could taste it all before we even left the house.

The way the burger was always just a little too big for the bun.

The salt sweet perfection of the fries.

The shake so thick you had to work for every sip and wanted it to last forever.

It wasn't just a restaurant.

It was a universe contained within four walls and a checkered floor.

A little bell above the door announced our arrival like a herald.

And the waitress, that woman who had been there since before I was born, would light up when she saw us coming.

She knew our order before we sat down, knew exactly how my mother liked her coffee and how she always wanted extra pickles.

This was recognition.

This was belonging.

But time, the great transformer of all things, began its slow work of changing us.

Somewhere in my teenage years, our family place became that old dive.

My tastes had evolved, or so I convinced myself.

I wanted ethnic food now, trendy chain restaurants with newer menus.

Anything that didn't remind me of being a child.

When my parents suggested our old spot, I'd roll my eyes with the practiced disdain of adolescence.

That greasy place?

Come on.

We can do better than that.

I was too busy becoming who I thought I should be to notice that my parents eyes would dim a little when I rejected their invitations.

Too self absorbed to understand that they weren't just suggesting a meal.

They were offering a return to a time when we were all happier, simpler, more connected to each other and to joy itself.

After all, this is the American story, isn't it?

The way neighborhoods change.

The way progress swallows the small businesses that were once the heartbeat of our communities.

The local diner, the corner barbershop, the family grocery store.

They fall one by one to the advancing army of corporate efficiency.

Our little restaurant became a chain, then another chain, then something else entirely.

The waitress who knew us disappeared into the economic displacement that reshapes communities, taking with her the institutional memory of our favorite orders and the genuine affection that can't be trained into employees, only earned through years of shared moments.

Years later, when I became a parent myself, I found myself driving through that same Neighborhood.

With my own child buckled into the backseat.

The streets looked different.

Wider, somehow less intimate.

The trees I remembered had been cut down to make room for development.

But as we passed that corner where our place used to be, I found myself slowing down, pointing to the spot where a different restaurant now stood.

This is where your grandparents used to take me when I was your age, I told my daughter, surprised by the thickness of my voice.

They had the best burgers, and there was a waitress who remembered everyone's name.

Your grandparents would hold my hands in the parking lot and swing me between them all the way to the door.

I'd be so excited I could barely sit still.

My baby listened with the polite attention children give to their parents.

Ancient history.

Not understanding this story was really about love.

About the way love tastes like chocolate milkshakes and sounds like the bell above a diner door.

I'm sure decades will pass like seasons.

Soon enough, my daughter will be driving me through the streets I will no longer recognize.

You mean driving us.

Okay, okay.

I'm just checking you're paying attention.

Our daughter will be driving us through the streets I no longer recognize.

Better.

Yes.

Much better.

Anytime I'm in a story, it's better.

My hometown will have transformed so completely, it might as well be another planet.

And the corner where my favorite spot once stood will be an intersection that I can't quite place in the geography of my memory.

But we'll pause there anyway, because something in my bones will recognize this place even when my mind can't grasp where we are.

I won't remember that name of the rest restaurant.

The details will have become foggy, negotiable.

I'll barely be able to conjure up the faces of my parents, those young people who seem so permanent, so eternal in their love for me.

Even the taste of that perfect cheeseburger will have faded from my sensory memory.

But there is something that will never fade.

What?

Time seems powerless to touch.

A feeling that rushes through me like hot honey, like laughter mixing with familiar voices.

It's the overwhelming sense of being loved.

Of being safe, of being exactly where I belonged.

The feeling of small hands being held by larger ones, of being swung between two people who would have moved mountains to see me smile.

This is what I understand now as I enter the twilight of my own story.

Restaurants close, neighborhoods change.

Memories fade.

But love, true love, exists outside of time and space.

It's not dependent on the physical structures that once contained it or the specific details that once defined it.

Love is the constant that survives all variables of the human Experience.

As my child pulls away from that corner, I'll close my eyes and let that feeling wash over me one last time.

I'm seven years old again, and the whole world tastes like possibility.

There's a land that I have heard about so far across the sea.

Halfway across the world and decades before my childhood memories were forming, a young man named Neville Livingston was crafting his own vision of belonging.

He'd become known as Bunny Wailer, and in his hands, the simple human yearning for a place to call home became something both deeply personal and profoundly political.

His song Dreamland, my favorite Bunny song, is a blueprint drawn in melody, charting a course back to wholeness that would outlive colonial disruption and outlast cultural displacement.

When Bunny Wailer sings, there's a land that I have heard about so far across the sea, he was doing more than painting pretty pictures of paradise.

He was reaching across centuries of forced migration, across the violent interruption that had severed ancestral connections towards something that had been taken but never truly destroyed.

I can just imagine him in Scratchperry's studio alongside Peter and Bob, his voice carrying the weight of collective memory as he imagined getting breakfast from the trees and honey from the bees.

More than just lyrics, these were acts of resistance, visions of a world where abundance flows naturally and human beings exist in harmony with creation rather than exploiting it.

A place where the violence of plantation agriculture gives way to the gentle rhythm of gathering what the earth freely offers, and where survival doesn't require the subjugation of others.

The true genius of Bunny's vision lies in its refusal to locate paradise in some distant, abstract realm.

His dreamland pulses with the same immediacy that made my childhood diner feel like the center of the universe.

When he sings about living together, having so much fun, he's describing the same essential human experience I knew as a child.

The joy of being fully seen, fully accepted, fully at home with the people who matter most.

But where my childhood paradise existed in the protective bubble of American prosperity, Bunny's dreamland had to be fought for, sung into existence against the backdrop of a society still dealing with the aftermath of colonialism, one that required not just personal but collective healing, not just individual recognition, but systematic change that would honor the dignity of all people.

Yet both our visions share the same foundation.

The belief that somewhere, somehow, there is a place where we can be fully ourselves.

We where love is abundant and the rough edges of life are softened by real connections.

Whether it's counting stars in the eternal sky as Bunny sings, surely we'll never die or Sitting in a booth in a restaurant where time seems suspended by the warmth of family, these dreams tap into our deepest knowing about what makes life worth living.

The thread that connects Bunny Wailer's spiritual homeland to my childhood memories and to every version of the American Dream that has ever taken root in human imagination is actually surprisingly simple.

It's the recognition that paradise isn't a place you find, but a feeling you create.

It's not about the destination.

It's about the quality of presence you bring to wherever you are, and more importantly, who you are.

Sharing that presence with the people you love, care for, feel comfortable around.

This is what the American Dream has always been reaching towards.

Even when we're tangled up in materialism and we're divided into separate tribes, at its core is the promise that everyone deserves recognition, acceptance.

A place where we're known and our particular way of being in the world, as long as it doesn't harm others, is celebrated rather than merely tolerated.

It's about creating conditions where human dignity can flourish, where our differences become sources of strength rather than division.

And Bunny Wailer understood this intuitively.

His dreamland wasn't just about returning to Africa.

It was about returning to a way of being where black lives weren't constantly under threat, where creativity could flourish without having to prove its worthiness to hostile systems, where community meant more than just proximity.

And we all carry the blueprints for this dreamland in our hearts.

That corner diner from my childhood offered a tiny version of this same sanctuary for those few hours each visit.

Nothing existed beyond our table, our conversation, our shared pleasure in simple foods made special by the context of care and the love that surrounded it.

These moments of perfect belonging, whether in a Jamaican artist's vision of paradise or an American child's favorite meal, remind us that revolution isn't only about changing circumstances, but about remembering what it feels like to be fully human.

Ensuring that future generations will have their own corner booths, their own moments of recognition, their own experiences of being exactly where they belong with exactly the people they love.

An American dreamland, where we all have a place at the table.

There's a lamb that I have heard about so far across the sea There's a land that I have heard about so far across the sea to have you on my dreamland Would be like heaven to me we'll get our breakfast from the tree we'll get our honey from the me we'll take a ride on the waterfall and all the glories we have them all and we live together on that dreamland and have so much fun we live together all that dreamland and have so much more oh, what a time that will be oh.

Yes, you wait, wait, wait Produced by Henry K.