Exploring What Is the American Dream Today

What is the American dream? In this essay it's defined as living the American Dream is what most people see as living a good and wealthy life. On the outside, people with successful lives seem to have their money come easily to them, but when you take a closer look, it is not always like that. Achieving the American dream has seemingly become a competition, and whether or not you can win appears to be heavily based on where you were born. And just like in all competitions there are people who are willing to lie and cheat to come out on top.

In our society money controls everything, it controls things like where you live, what you eat, how much you can eat, what you wear every day. People who have bucket loads of money already have a head start in the game. They don’t need to work hard to earn money, so they are at an advantage. An example of this is shown in the Park Avenue documentary when playing monopoly, one person was given money and 2 dice while the other player was given less money and was only allowed to roll one dice. The first player was able to get around the game board faster therefore was able to buy the properties faster and make money of the other player, that other player was then stuck moving around the board slowly and having a higher chance on landing on one of the properties that player one owned. This made it almost impossible for the player with one dice and less money to win, reflecting how society works in real life. 13.9 percent of U.S citizens are below the poverty line, so in the case of the monopoly these people have been handed less money and one dice. In The great Gatsby people who were poor/living in the valley of ashes were seen as inferior and looked down upon. And to some people like Jay Gatsby were also inferior because the held new money not old. Everyone on power tells you that if you work hard enough you can achieve the dream but The Great Gatsby shows this to be false for some. George Wilson was a hardworking man who owned his own business, but even with his hard work his wife cheated on him with another married man and was then murdered by his wife. He was still stuck in the valley of ashes, thinking Gatsby murdered his wife so he shot him then himself. That doesn’t seem like much of a good dream to me.

Society is so obsessed with the idea of the dream that they are willing to do just about anything to achieve it. I mean what wouldn’t you do to make a lot of money, would you throw you morals out the window? Would you lie and cheat? Sacrificing morals seems to be the only way that anyone can actually achieve the great American dream. Myrtle lied to her husband and proceeded to cheat on him with Tom Buchanan because she wanted to live a rich and wealthy life. Gatsby used illegal means to gain his wealth, he broke the law just so he could have the money to impress Daisy. Fitzgerald was trying to show that trying to achieve things by doing morally wrong deeds doesn’t work out as these two people both ended up dead in the end. Tom Buchanan also lied to George buy saying he was going to sell his car to George as an excuse to keep coming over to see myrtle and telling her to go meet up with his later, which is also morally wrong because he knew that George was myrtles husband. West Egg and New York are separated by The Valley Of Ashes. It being positioned in this location could symbolize moral decay as it is filled with the ash from the city’s industry, it also held the crime scene that happens at the end of the novel. In the documentary it showed a man who lied to gain his wealth and popularity, he lied about his beliefs but the documentary showed the things he used to say. Millionaires use their wealth to rig the system so they aren’t paying as much tax when paying normal amount wouldn’t affect how rich they were anyway. This doesn’t really make me fall in love with the idea of having high aspirations or living the American dream.

The American dream is also getting harder to achieve because the goals are bigger it has evolved from a thing of simplicity to something complex. The American dream was quite simple in the 1930’s it wasn’t about the newest iPhone or the latest technology James Truslow Adams said that “it is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” After World War II, the American Dream was still the belief of freedom and equality, not just material items or wealth. It was in Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in 1963 that his vision was one that was “deeply rooted in the American dream”, it wasn’t until the G.I bill introduced in 1944 the made the dream become about materialistic things. After that in about the 1990’s the world started to make the technological advancements the gat us where we are today, everyone wanted a tv, a cell phone, a computer or the new video games, and today its still about having those things but now the idea of being the richest and wealthiest has taken part of the dream making it extremely hard to achieve the great dream

One more definition of what is the American Dream for this essay is one of the examples of Elizabeth Warren's sayings: “This country isn’t working for working people. Its working for the people at the top. That’s not the American dream, that’s the American nightmare”. This quote shows that the people who already started out on top are most likely the only ones who will continue to be out on top. The poor are only poor because the rich are the ones in power if people stopped stepping on others than maybe there would be more of a fair chance for everyone. It wouldn’t be so hard for people to earn their money and gain wealth if the people who were higher up didn’t make it so hard. If the higher ups stopped raising taxes in their favour, making it so they had to pay less than for everyone else it wouldn’t be as hard to afford living. “The ideal by which equality of opportunity is available to any American, allowing the highest aspirations and goals to be achieved”. The thought of that sounds nice but is the equality of opportunity really available to every American because if it was don’t you think that a lot more people would’ve achieved the dream.