The American Dream

[SOURCE]

The American Dream: Is it slipping away?

by Gregory Rodriguez.

'For all the talk these days of porous borders and external threats to the United States, the core of our sense of security and identity as a nation has always come from within. What's surprising, perhaps, is that it derives less from our vaunted democracy or our freedoms than it does from that rather nebulous notion we call the American dream.

The dream is the glue that keeps us all together. It's the vague promise that our lot will get better over time that gives us the patience to endure whatever indignities we suffer at the moment. It's the belief that our kids will have a better chance in life than we do that keeps the many elements of this diverse, highly competitive society from ultimately tearing each other apart. More than anything else, it's the fabled dream that fuses hundreds of millions of separate, even competing individual dreams into one national collective enterprise.

But what happens when too many Americans stop believing in that dream? Last week's ABC News/Yahoo News poll revealed that today, only half of us think the American dream — which the pollsters defined as "if you work hard you'll get ahead" — still holds true, while 43% said that it had once been true. That only 4% of respondents thought that there was never such a dream testifies to the power of the phenomenon.

Not surprisingly, attitudes varied from group to group. Respondents with higher incomes tended to still believe in the dream more than those with lower incomes. Similarly, the college educated were bigger believers than the less educated. Independent voters believe less than either Democrats or Republicans, and Americans who live in the West are significantly more likely to believe than those in the Rust Belt. Reflective perhaps of varying levels of expectations — or sense of entitlement — nonwhites are more likely to believe in the dream than are whites.'

So is it true? Have we lost sense of what the American Dream is? It's no surprise that the economy is diminishing nowadays and taxes are taking over the majority of our incomes. Economic security is one aspect of the Dream, but will that matter in the future? A lot of Americans have trouble getting by as is, with their current status. Lower to middle class families have it worse. We see in the article how only those with larger amounts of wealth really have a dream that does not relate to money. The wealthier people get, the more their dream becomes about the pursuit of happiness and social class. The poorer people get, the more they worry about their economic status. The line between the two seems like it's boldly defined, but in actuality only the individual can truly decide what they want.