I wanted to comment on Meredith’s post about the American dream. I feel like Meredith brings up good points about the American Dream and its significance in American history, but there are two points I wanted to touch on further. The first is the idea of the American Dream in the 1950’s. The American Dream was an ideal based on the suburbia’s. Basically the dream was to get out of the city and to have all the “fine” things life could offer; that is a nice car, perfect house, and a socially adequate family. This idea was predominantly geared toward whites, but not limited to whites. There was nothing saying a black family couldn’t move to a suburb but of course they would be discriminated. The point of the matter is though that I feel the American Dream is not a way of life but rather a progression and transition of place of origin, which exists in a mindset. For example, the idea of the American Dream for first wave immigrants was to move out of conditions they were in and move to America. The idea in the 1950’s was to more out of the cities and to the suburbs. But, this is a good point to move on to my next point. What does the Dream look like today? I believe that the dream is almost dead in certain ways, and if not dead, inapplicable to our lives. We sure have the chance to better ourselves, but we are much more readily given those opportunities, and achieve them many times without the additive of handwork, something the original Dream was based off of.
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