My grandfather grew up in some no name village in the Indian state of Gujarat. His family worked the fields, just like his ancestors before him. It’s different now, my cousins there arguably have a more comfortable quality of life than I do here, but I remember how it got there. I still remember that trip as young child with grandparents, taking the bumpy dirt road we had to take to see our relatives. I still remember the two sheds in the back, one for cleaning, one for the other stuff.

But his older brothers had vision, deep down they knew his potential was wasted on a farm. So they labored long and hard to raise the funds to send him to a better school. That better school led to a Bachelors in Physics. That then brought him to his great nation where he earned a second bachelors in Mechanical Engineering at in Kentucky at the University of Louisville, later to Pennsylvania for his Masters in the same field at Bucknell University. He then went on to work a normal job and live a comfortable life in New Jersey.

But that wasn’t enough for him. He volunteered in the independence movement as a high schooler in India, and much like Lebron in 2014, he felt a pull to bring his talents back home. Yes his family created that initial momentum, but what this country enabled for him was an exponential increase in opportunity. That was the American Dream that he carried back with him.

Was he alone for this journey? Not for most of it. Like I mentioned in long history I just recapped, my grandfather came to Kentucky. The man had hardly traveled outside his state and now he was halfway across the world. By grace or luck, a kind American woman and her husband took him in. Later my grandmother joined him. A woman who to this day can’t speak English and never studied beyond high school. She somehow made it on a flight with layovers from India to Louisville.

My mother has a more tragic story. She lost her mother when she was in high school. As a result, her brother and she came to this country to live with their elder sister. They helped them settle here. I’ve heard the boomer stories. Walking to campus and work to save money on transit, juggling three jobs with school, photocopying textbooks at the library, and the rest. And where did that end? Well she went on to earn a Bachelors in Computer Science at Northeastern, and got that stable white-collar job that immigrants strive for. Later to sacrifice it to raise her kids as her husband’s job started to involve regular travel.

Now I’ll pivot back to my paternal side. My grandfather carried that American Dream back with him. It eventually made its way to my father. In India, he was too smart and too lazy for his own good. He outgrew his small body of water and made his way across the pond. And then successfully defended his PhD in Electrical Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

An American of Indian descent with a triple digit number of patents that he has written started off sharing a bedroom with multiple other relatives in his elder cousin’s basement and delivering the newspaper early in the morning before the lab opened.

He had that stable job, but this is America. We want bigger. We want better. We need better and better. He was no different. Failed startup? Doesn’t matter, try again. Second one fails? Try again. Eventually one of the swings hit, and the ball flew out of the park. It gave his kids the immense privilege to pursue their undergraduate studies without having to be worried about the financial implications.

I love this country. Much like family. Despite all of its flaws, despite all the various ways it has and continues to fuck up, despite actively harming the people who build it up, I still love this country. That Dream of opportunity is why I am here right now as an unhinged man in The One Star State typing on a keyboard in an air conditioned room.