The False Promise of the American Dream
The ‘American dream,’ something each of us have heard in social studies class, is a promise of false hope that our country has baited us with since it’s beginning. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the famous words that are associated with the ‘great’ American dream. Life: food, healthcare, and shelter; Liberty: the freedom to practice bodily and religious autonomy; and most of all the pursuit of happiness. Those who come to America, in pursuit of their happiness, are not able to even try to do that, even natural born citizens are not guaranteed that.
Life is built on a lot of things, the foundation, or the bare minimum being food and water. Hundreds of American citizens go without food or clean water due to our economy. They cannot afford food, not while they are paying rent. They cannot have clean water due to pipelines, and they cannot afford bottled water. And those foundations are not even the limit to it. When you think ‘the American dream’ you think of immigrants coming to America. They first must find a job, which most of the time is incredibly hard for them to do, then get a home which is even harder with them being a foreigner and they must save for a downpayment or a security deposit. Then on top of that, one of the main things of ‘our American dream’ is building a family. How can you make a family when, even with insurance, just the delivery of a baby costs upwards of $30,000? Then there’s vaccines, some needed for jobs or for school, basic checkups, if you get sick, thousands and thousands build which make this part of the ‘American dream’ seem so unachievable.
Liberty, the right of your own body and religion. We do have a lot of freedoms, we can protest, say what we want, have whatever news we care about in the press. But for many things, especially recently we do not have the freedom, or liberty, to express. This can include gender, who you love, or even just who your parents are. These very things are part of the reason a considerable number of immigrants come to America: to be freed from forms of religious prosecution that we are now having to deal with. And, as the last layer of the ‘anti liberty cake’ women cannot even choose what they want to do with their lives in some cases.
The last, and most important fault in the American dream is the opportunity to even attempt to pursue happiness. There are 12 years of basic education, you must have transportation to get there. You need help to understand the language if you do not already know. If you have a learning disability, most of the time you are out of luck. If you cannot afford to eat or pay rent, you must drop out. And if you make it out of school? Good luck finding a job you enjoy without thousands of dollars of student debt you will never pay off. These are only some of the hurdles that regular American citizens jump over, then the many more immigrants must go over.
Though, even with all of the weights that hold us down, it is possible to obtain the American dream, but it is falsely advertised. With this notion, there is no fixed ‘yes or no’ to the American dream, we are just given a clouded view of what it takes to have it.
