When I picture the American dream, I think of the perfectly manicured lawns in “Edward Scissor Hands.” I think of families huddled around a radio, listening to old programs such as “The Shadow” and eating freshly baked Toll House cookies out of a classic tin. I think of Spot the dog, Dick and Jane, white-picket fences and vintage cars. Clearly, at some point, I disassociated our national ethos and reality.
I am not a history major, but I know that as far back into our history as I can recall, we as Americans have regarded and promoted ourselves as the pinnacle of liberty and equality. The meaning of the American dream has changed over the years, perhaps birthed out of the New World and the mysterious attributes of frontier life, but somewhere along the way, it became a commodity.
It is safe to say that the American dream lured millions of people of all nations to U.S. shores. The engraving on the Statue of Liberty, a sonnet by Emma Lazarus, proclaims, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
It’s a good dream. It indicates that anyone should be able to achieve prosperity through hard work and individual choice without restrictions based on class, caste, religion, ethnicity, disability or race. Martin Luther King, in his Letter from a Birmingham jail, proclaimed, “We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”
So, why is it that I, a child of the ‘90s, associate the American dream not with freedom or equality but with shows like Leave it to Beaver? Why didn’t I ever inherit this dream?
After World War II, the U.S. was the last economy standing, and it thrived. All of a sudden, Americans were enjoying an unprecedented standard of living, started sending their children to college, bought their homes, owned a car, a television. As far as I can tell, somewhere in there, the American dream was commercialized.
Then the ‘70s hit, and things got rough: prices soared, unemployment rose and to maintain the standard of living, we started borrowing. Wives didn’t bake Toll House cookies anymore. They went to work because a middle class house built on one-income wasn’t going to stay middle class for long. Good things came out of this such as the Women’s Strike for Equality, but the dream we started chasing had changed.
I first heard the “We built it!” slogan while watching the Republican National Convention on television. Despite being birthed from a misinterpreted speech given by President Barack Obama, this slogan says a lot about the perceived American dream.
The slogan was mainly used to reference the various businesses developed by Americans, but the sentiment is strong. “We built it,” invokes all those images I associate with the American dream and embodies a strong sense of community.
This is a great market strategy, selling a dream that incorporates me and makes me think of my great-grandfather, a coalminer and then his son, my grandfather, a college grad driving a Thunderbird.
Yet, somewhere there is a disconnect between my great-grandfather the coalminer and me the college student and the slogan, “We built it.”
We didn’t build it, or at least I didn’t build it. And certainly none of us did it alone. My great-grandfather, the coalminers who sweated and died of black lung alongside him and all of those workers did.
We were born onto a platform that was already built, one I’ll hopefully add to, and when my kids add to that platform, my family will be elevated. So we keep building on our families past achievements and the bottom floor keeps rising. But the only American dream that seems to fit here now is the commercialized one of the late ‘40s. All we are chasing is a standard of living that is unsustainable, and it seems as if we’ve lost the origins of the dream altogether.
We have to step back and ask, “Should anyone be able to achieve prosperity, regardless of their class, caste, religion, ethnicity, disability or race?”
For me, the answer is obvious. Yes, of course they should, but then there’s the hesitation, can they? Or has that American dream become just some dream from a simpler time when the floor was the floor and no one had thought to raise it and leave people beneath? Has the American dream become a privileged dream to be discussed in humanities classes? Or is it something we can again make attainable?
I think we need to stop passing our families’ achievements as our own and start thinking about the basics needed to maintain a standardized quality of life from which people can prosper. I’m actually kind of fond of this vintage dream. I think we should take it back. So, all that’s left is how…
Arielle Egan is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and a Fall 2012 columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at aegan@bu.edu.
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