I came to New York from Odessa in 1977, a Soviet Jewish kid of six who spoke no English. What I owned fit in a suitcase. What I gained was a country entering its most unapologetically aspirational decade, and its music became my foundation. The anthems paved the way forward.
By nine, I had Irene Cara singing "Fame" on my radio. "I'm gonna live forever. I'm gonna learn how to fly." Nobody sang those lines with a wink. The film followed New York kids who wanted to be great and said so out loud. In the country I left, ambition outside the approved channels marked you. Here, they set it to a beat and danced.
Cara did it again in 1983 with "Flashdance... What a Feeling," which won the Oscar for Best Original Song. "Take your passion and make it happen." A welder wants to dance. No credentials, no permission, just want. America turned it into a phenomenon.
Survivor wrote "Eye of the Tiger" for Rocky III. A fighter rises and refuses to stay down. Journey gave us "Don't Stop Believin'," where a small-town girl boards the midnight train toward a bigger life. And in 1985, John Parr wrote "St. Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion)" for Rick Hansen, a Canadian athlete paralyzed at fifteen who wheeled 40,000 kilometers around the world for spinal cord research. I can climb the highest mountain. The man in the song could not walk. He crossed the earth anyway.
I never expected to reach those stars, and I did not need to. These songs made the striving itself the honor. The reaching was the point. That reframed everything for an immigrant kid with the wrong accent and the wrong clothes. My circumstances were not a verdict but a starting line.
The movies married that music to something I wanted even more than success, which was belonging. Footloose put a boy against a town that banned dancing and let him win by refusing to sit still. The Brat Pack films did the rest. The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo's Fire, Pretty in Pink. Kids who felt like outsiders found each other, backed each other, and reached for adult lives together. Their soundtracks, blasting from boomboxes all around me, fused their dreams to my own. Watching them, I learned what I thought America was. A place where the misfits form their own crew and go get the future.
That belief runs straight through one small film at the edge of the decade. In 1990, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael featured Winona Ryder as a misfit girl in an Ohio town. A boy tells her he wants to kiss her. She answers in five words that could be the epigraph for the whole era, and the country, too.
"It's good to want things."
It is. Wanting is not greed or vanity. Wanting is the engine. A nation founded 250 years ago on the pursuit of happiness, never its guarantee, understood that the pursuit is the gift. You get the striving and the open road.
What you make of it is yours.
Children now grow up in a culture that often calls ambition gauche and achievement unfair. They deserve what I absorbed from the music and film all around me at nine – to hear that their reach should exceed their grasp, that adversity is the setup and not the sentence, and that in this country a welder becomes a dancer, a paralyzed kid circles the earth, and a girl from Odessa grows up to make films, raise children, and write these words as a free American.
Happy 250th birthday to the country that told me it's good to want things.
It still is.
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Natalya Murakhver is a filmmaker whose documentaries 15 DAYS and Uncancellable tell the true stories of Americans living out the dream, defending free speech, and pursuing what they want against the odds. In their own way, they are heirs to the aspirational films of the 1980s.
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