I am America.

I’m not being grandiose. You’re America, too. We all are, and that’s not just some warm ’n’ fuzzy, holiday-patriotism thing.

But I’m a particular kind of American, a descendant of a classic American Dream. And as we close out a year that has seen the American Dream turn to ashes for too many people, it’s been on my mind.

I always get a charge out of hearing the story of European immigrants to this country and what happened to them, their children and their grandchildren. It’s so common a story as to be nearly prosaic, but that very banality is what makes it resonate so with me. There are many people who have the same story, and I feel a bond with every one of them.

I am the grandchild of immigrants, illiterate Sicilian peasants who fled a life well worth leaving. It’s always amused me that so many Scandinavian immigrants dreamed of making their fortune here and returning to the old country; my grandfather wouldn’t have returned to Sicily at gunpoint. He left because it was a horrible place, promising only a life of extreme toil, grinding poverty and an early death.

But he came here and built his life, working with his back because — though he was a smart man and a whiz with figures — illiteracy and immigrant status weren’t a good foundation for a white-collar career. He worked in a foundry and as a carpenter to support his family, while Grandma ran the house.

They had eight children, the youngest of whom would become my mother. She married her high school sweetheart, who went off to World War II, returned home, went to Michigan State University on the G.I. Bill and spent the rest of his solidly middle-class life working in sales and marketing and living in the suburbs. My parents had four kids, three of whom gave them grandchildren. The four of us have our lives. It’s crossed my mind many times that there’s a certain irony in my making a living as a writer, producing something my grandfather could not have consumed.

Pretty dull story, no? No surprises there. My grandparents and their descendants are children of the Dream.

But now, with the worst economy since the Depression — which was so much a formative experience for my parents’ generation — many are asking if the Dream is dead.

Well, it depends on how you define it. The Dream that so many Americans were sold, which involved mostly unbridled, unreasoning consumerism, probably is gone. It should never have come into being anyway, so maybe that’s not a bad thing, but people are loathe to let it go.

So much of what we’re told by people in the business of selling that version of the Dream has to do with simple acquisitiveness. The dream, they tell us, is that car, that house, that high-paying job that will enable you to buy more stuff. Thus, we are told that owning a house is the American Dream, which it might have been for my grandparents, who had no chance of buying property in Sicily. But when you grew up in a house your family “owned,” you didn’t grow up with the hunger for land. And I put “owned” in quotes because any reasonable person knows that until you’ve paid it off, you don’t own your house; you own, for many years at first, a small patch of the yard, maybe. And that’s why it’s come as such a shock to so many foreclosure victims this year that their home ownership was more apparent than real.

But perhaps a more sanguine take is that the real American Dream, the one that really matters, won’t die, because it’s part of human nature. It has a little to do with acquiring stuff, but that’s really a pretty minor part of it.

The American Dream is a vision of improving your lot. That’s why so much of what makes up the Dream doesn’t really carry a price tag — at least not one that’s marked in dollars. The coin of the realm is aspiration. Not for nothing was “hope” the big theme of the Obama presidential campaign. People are hungry for it. And more, people are nearly hard-wired for it.

And it’s a very human thing, so human that much of the rest of the world has leaders who must labor long and hard to keep citizens’ hope at bay. We see it elsewhere every so often — in Tiananmen Square, in the Philippines, in other places where people finally decide they have taken all the crap they will. And when our government wants to undertake some military misadventure for dubious reasons, they use our fondness for the Dream as a justification, which is the down side of the thing.

But ours is perhaps the only nation where the Dream is such a part of the warp and woof of the country and its people. There’s a class system here, to be sure, and upward mobility isn’t possible for many of us, but there’s at least a chance of it, however remote. At least you can look at your children and hope they will someday go beyond where they started. That kind of hope may border on being illusory, but it’s just real enough that it can keep you going on days when the demands are unreasonable and the bills seem insurmountable.

More than 40 years ago, the writer Leonard Shecter said in his book, “The Jocks,” “There are shadows on our land, shadows of hate and war and poverty and despair.” Those shadows are still with us. For all we’ve gone through since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Shecter penned those words, not much has changed.

But consider this: We’re still here. That we are still struggling with issues we debated 40 years ago shows our resilience as much as our (sometime) stupidity.

It’s not stuff that’s the Dream. It’s that resilience and the hope that it can be maintained and, later, justified. Hope can be a cruel thing, but as Dreams go, I’ll take that one any day.