Much has been written about the enormous oil boom currently happening in, of all places, the wild and remote state of North Dakota, where thousands of people, mostly men, are working literally day and night to extract oil from massive beds of shale for shipment not just to the U.S. but all over the world.  One wonders what the state will do when the boom, as all booms do, end, but at the moment it is enjoying the massive revenues pouring into its tax coffers and appreciates the distinction of being one of the few states in America in which unemployment is virtually nonexistent.
     Prior to the boom, North Dakota was dying, abandoned, as it were, by the rest of the country, its farms shrinking and disappearing, its young people leaving, its towns, one by one, closing.  It was facing the final onslaught of the rugged prairies out of which it had come, descending into the proverbial rabbit hole for all time.
     As one writer observed recently, the current boom is a case of a vision outpacing its delusions.  North Dakota chases a dream that, like the dream of Southern California, a dream made possible only by exporting tremendous amounts of water from outside the state, may in the end prove to be built on little more than the sinking sand out of which it has come.  But that, I suppose, is the nature of dream.  We dream because the vision it provides is better than facing the delusion that is never far behind it.
     On the other hand, that's why we dream:  we tend to see the future more clearly than we see the past, for just as the past grounds the future, it is the future that explains the past, a past that, if it did not have a future, would be a spirit without a home.
     It's hard to live without a dream; it's even harder to live without a reason to dream.
     That's why we appreciate redemption:  it's a constant promise that what will come will be better than what has been--and that has been is the backbone of what will be.