A week before the Fourth of July, YO! Radio producer Mark Jacks went into the streets of San Francisco to talk to teenagers about what America means to them. Without further comment, we share their answers with you.

-- This place is all messed up. It's all about money really.

-- The opportunity to experience different cultures.

-- You don't have to be like molded into anything, you can just do whatever you want cause you're in America.

-- Being part of a very powerful country with a lot of responsibilities that doesn't always do the right thing.

-- I guess ideally freedom -- freedom of choice, being able to -- you know, if you have the ambition, the American dream I guess kind of thing.

-- I guess it's the opportunity to experience different cultures and different ethnic groups, and to learn about other cultures which doesn't happen in other parts or the world.

-- I think it's tempting to look at America as some sort of melting pot. More often it seems to me that there's a lot of smaller subcultures competing with each other at the edges. Sometimes they melt together at those edges and they interact in very complex ways but I don't think there's a really dominant culture. If there was a dominant culture I think it would probably have something to do with business because that seems to me one of the dominant themes of American life.

-- Personally for myself I was in Indonesia and the first thing that I can associate with America is there's a lot more opportunity for a lot of different possibilities and jobs. There's no real stereotype in metropolitan areas as to what a good job is, what a good living is, what a good style is. So to put it shortly I guess I would associate it with opportunities in one word.

-- Oh I just feel that it's all right to do anything, that you don't have to be like molded into anything, you can just do whatever you want cause you're an American and you can chew gum and do whatever.

-- I think Americans have a lot of freedom to choose what they want to do and to pursue their dream and they got a lot of time to really choose, I have to say. Asians, they have limited time to choose what they want. They have to decide earlier on in their lives, to say "this is what I want to do" and stick with it. And here they get to experiment and experience different things and then, let's say in their mid-30s, that's when they decide, "Oh this is what I want to do, I'm becoming an accountant."

-- The good things are that you have maybe more freedom to explore things you want to do than some other cultures or places where you grow up, and you can explore a little bit more. But some of the down sides are family ties that are not as strong, and probably more family problems, maybe a higher divorce rate.

-- I think sometimes American get caught in forgetting to be grateful for the things they have. Like we kind of grew up with all this luxury around us, all these things, and in the end we say things are grand and that can lead to all this wastefulness which is a big problem.