The Ethos Of The American Dream

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Brian Redman English 101 Essay 3 August 8, 2012 American Dream The “American Dream”: ethos for the United States. It is a set of ideas in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward mobility achieved through hard work. (Wikipedia) Our founding fathers may have planted the roots for it by saying, “all men are created equal” and we will base our ideas on, “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Wow, those words really did strike a chord when I was a young boy. I always believed that America looked out for everyone’s best interest. I slowly started to realize that America may not be living up to those standards that the constitution was based on. All people are not treated as equals. A person…show more content…
It’s a nightmare. For those that are living in poverty, but still put in over forty hours of work a week, the American Dream is a haunting reminder of how others get to enjoy their money. The working poor only get to struggle to maintain enough money to get through each day. There is no planning a vacation off of minimum wage, no such thing as a good or even a proper education. For those that live in poverty, working hard to achieve a goal means to work as much as you can so you can have electricity for the month or a decent meal. In this part of her essay “Ghetto Fabulous”, Tina Fakhrid-Deen brings up the issue of growing up in poverty. “At Halloween, we got yelled at or whipped for throwing eggs, not because it was childish and rude, but because we were screwing with the food supply.” (Fakhrid-Deen: 156) Many kids get to act as kids do because they do not have to worry if they are affecting how they will receive their next meal. For kids that live in poverty many will always have the burden of worrying if they will go to bed hungry at night instead of going out and doing wasteful…show more content…
How is that life? Mindlessly putting in your hours at a job that will make you work full time and offer you no benefits or even a decent work environment. Life? There are opportunities for everyone to pursue happiness; many do not know how to get out of poverty because it is all they have ever known. Katherine Arnoldi talks about how she has a job that can provide her with the basic needs in life, but the job that she is working in isn’t something that she wants for the rest of her life. “As soon as I was meeting those basic needs, I thought about the future: about freedom from fear of factory layoffs, freedom from the monotony and misery of the job.” (Arnoldi: 258) In the essay “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Education” She struggles to find that answers to how she can work in the factory and still find answers to how she can improve her life by pursuing an education. All she wants, like many others, is an opportunity to feel like she can have a prospect of raising her family in an area that offers more than what she has to settle

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