History and Politics of the United States of America (Essay Sample)

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The American Dream
America and Americans have throughout history been a cherished nation and individuals respectively that everyone from all corners of the globe is ever yearning to be associated with or to one day live in. This endeavor has roots in the success stories about America and its people. In fact, each year there are millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal, who make it to this great nation in the hope of better prospects in life. The main conception that has kept American hopes high over the years is the strong and fervent belief in the "American Dream”. My goal in this paper is to analyze the American Dream and bring to the fore the fact that the dream is no longer in existence, if not a mirage and pipe dream, to certain groups of people in America. Emphasis will be laid on the economic standpoint of the American Dream.
The conception of the American dream has its origin in the United States Declaration of Independence from the British. From this early standpoint, the idea of the American Dream is that all men and women are created equal and are invested with inalienable rights and freedoms by God. The most important of these rights are the rights to liberty, equality and self-determination in their individual pursuit of success and happiness in life. Additionally, the origins and meaning of the concept of American Dreams is to be found in the words of Truslow. In his Novel, the writer succinctly brings out the conception of the American Dream as follows:
That dream of land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with equal opportunity for each according to [their] ability or achievement… A dream of 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 be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of their fortuitous circumstances of birth or position (34).
In other words, the American Dream is an idea based on liberal philosophy that each and every American should, through hard work, be able to achieve success regardless of their social-economic status or even racial background. However, as will be evident throughout this paper theme, the long cherished and strongly held dream seems to be waning and losing its meaning to some groups of people in the United States of America.
One group of people to whom the infamous American Dream seems to be a mere disappointment and a pipe dream is the illegal immigrants, mostly from the neighboring Mexico. Depalma, in an article in the New York Times portrays the real life experiences and economic hard ships that these immigrants face both at work and school for their children. According the writer, the greatest hindrance to this group of Mexico-Americans is their illegal status which denies them the equal opportunity rights with other Native Americans in the economic and social spheres. To them, the future seems gloomy an uncertain. To some of them, entry into America and finding jobs did not prove cumbersome. What proved to be a herculean task for most of these illegal immigrants, Depalma notes, was the possibility and opportunity of job advancement and enhanced upward social mobility or climbing the employment ladder (Depalma 4).
In addition to the above challenges, there is the social problem of resentment and racial mistrust that exist between the illegal immigrants and Native Americans. The locals feel that with the burgeoning immigrant population who are ready to offer cheap labor, their job security could be at stake. Rising insecurity in most suburbs is also blamed on the immigrant youths who flock the American streets looking for a means of survival. Most of them end up frustrated in life, landing for menial hotel jobs that pay pea-nuts, insufficient to enable them advance socially like any other super-rich Americans. The healthcare for their children though catered for by the Medicaid, they are still forced to empty their pockets to meet other medical costs which substantially drain their meagre but hard-earned income (8). With progress but no success, conflicts arise in the places of work between these illegal immigrants and the Americans.
Furthermore, the other hurdle that stands in the path of achieving the American Dream is the apparent inequality particularly in the realm of education in the United States of America. Education plays a pivotal role in shaping the career future of children besides acting as an eye-opener and hence, early education offered to school going kids greatly determines their future prospects economically and socially.
Equality of arms in terms of education and its quality is a determinate factor of the realization of the dreams of any nation. However, things seem to be different in most American schools, with a combination of Native American children and foreign kids of Africans and the Hispanic descent. Kozol brings out the ostensible inequality that exits in the American system of education. He notes that the education system is structured in a way that prejudices and stereotypes the kid of Black American origin. He observes that the perception of black and Hispanic children in American schools is quite different and defeats the true spirit of the American Dream (531-532).
Furthermore, Kozol faults and vehemently vilifies what he calls scripted teaching method which serves as a corporate indoctrination machinery rather than social advancement in the school going children. He notes that there is a stark social and economic disparity among the school going kids with a disturbing percentage of the African-American children living in abject poverty. In one of the school reports, he observes that only a paltry twenty-five percent of the school children had attended pre-school classes, thus greatly disadvantaging them compared to their counterparts from well to do American families (533).
He also critiques the utilitarian mode of inculcating career skills in the school children that is based mainly on viewing the kids as "products" meant to amass wealth for the society in future. Further, Kozol takes issue with the treatment of minority children by the American education due to the rather jaundiced perception accorded to them. The children, he says, are always spoken and perceived of as specific to minority-serving schools (537).
The other group of people that has little or nothing to show as far as access to the cherished American Dream is the Middle Class Americans. The economic 2008 economic recession that hit America seems to have almost reversed all the fruits and achievements made by the United States from the Second World War to date. The recession threatened the American economy and the group that bore the brunt of the Great Recession is the Middle Class (Smith 30).
According to Smith, it is the super-rich American billionaires who benefited and continue to benefit from the American economy while the working and middle class continue to wallow in poverty due to low economic of advancements and low pay. He argues that these super-rich individuals amassed and accumulated for themselves almost the whole country’s resources leaving it vulnerable, hence we cannot talk of the American Dream any longer. He further notes that the greatest impediment to the realization of the American Dream is the gross income inequality that subsists among the American population today. To him, the economy is unfairly skewed towards benefiting a few individuals at the expense or detriment of the majority middle class (109).
Moreover, the issue of the disparity in intergenerational social and economic mobility among working Americans seems to largely impede the full attainment and realization of the American Dream. The current trends in the United States socioeconomic mobility is that the level and amount of income one earns from their job is influenced majorly by their parent’s social and economic background. This is independent of economic progress and growth such that , while the economy may be growing positively, there is little or no socioeconomic mobility advancement among the working population in the U.S (Starks 215)
The writer argues that the existing social inequality among American generations is a great barrier to upward occupational and income mobility. Stagnation in economic mobility, he notes, has the obvious impact of attaining equal opportunity status to every American despite their individual efforts and hard work. He concludes that the working conditions under which most Americans work on a daily basis have a significant influence on their perception of the American Dream realism (224).
Additionally, the other factors that have crowded in and co...