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ideal of the american dream
The American Dream
american dream,my dream
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There is no escape. It encompasses every factor of the modern American lifestyle. It all begins with "The American Dream," in which everyone strives to become part of the ideal, the obsession, that supposedly defines how happiness can be obtained. But happiness is not, contrary to the beliefs of the American Dreamers, measured on a checklist including 2.5 kids, 1 dog, 1 cat, quaint house in suburbs, white picket fence, 2 car garage, freshly mowed lawn, etc. That image is a facade over the ever-crumbling ashheaps of our world. It is impossible to measure one's life or happiness on a scale of coffee spoons, cars, or annual income, but people continue to plug away like machines for no other reason than to make the money that they honestly believe will bring them true happiness. This idea is everywhere, leaving much of America longing for a life that does not exist and working toward a goal that will never be reached.
It is not difficult to fall into the trap of the American ideal because we are already accustomed to absorbing, using, eating, believing every other man-made product, and the ideal is, in fact, just another fabrication of the society. Man is ungrateful, casting aside all that he has not manufactured or processed, abandoning the natural world from which he has emerged. America has been turned into "an immense country filled with decent houses, good roads, orchards, meadows, and bridges, where a hundred years ago all was wild, woody, and uncultivated" (St. Jean de Crevecoeur 440). Henderson searches for himself away from all that man has made, becoming dismayed to find that others have been to what he considers the beginning of the earth; even there the effect of society has seeped into life, takin...
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...ck of motivation. It is easy to fall victim to a lack of motivation upon seeing the collapse of the dream that was once the main driving force for people to work at all. The most powerful example of an ingredient missing in the wasteland is love. Love is the ultimate truth and the ultimate motivation, so when Frome has no love at all in his life and is left without any escape from his moral isolation, the wasteland cannot be denied. Likewise, when there is no love for what someone does and he only does it for the sake of living up to the ideal, such as the Lomans', the demise of the fantastic facade, and thus the onset of the wasteland, cannot be stopped. The wasteland inhabits all aspects of society today. It is a dark, gloomy cloud that hovers over the earth, blocking all hope-all life-from making its way into the reality of the world in which we live.
Edgar Allen Poe had a very complicated life from his birth. To begin with Edgar was born on January 19, 1809. (Britannica, 2013) In the meantime his father disappeared. Yet no one knows what ever happened to him. Then at age two he went on tour with his mother where he watched her die. (Britannica, 2013) To be more specific she kept spiting up blood and soon died of Tuberculoses. Afterwards Edgar was adopted by Frances and John Allan.
The American Dream is referred to by many people as the reason to come to America. It is, or so they say, the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Unfortunately they are incorrect, there truly is no American Dream, it is all an illusion given to us by our founding fathers as a reason for the inequality in which people are treated. I have lived in this country for 16 years now and have all the patriotic bullshit about how we give everyone equal opportunity and how everyone is equal in the eyes of the law. I just laugh when I read this. Throughout our country’s 300-year history, it is all about raising one person over the other. It started with the movement of the Native Americans. They were here before anyone else, and they were moved because they did not live with all the violence our ancestors did. The founding fathers continued to push them further and further away because it was beneficial to them at the time. They said if you stay here we will not bother you anymore, then when they decided that area was nice and they needed it for the white man. Then we began to take the black man out of Africa and use them on our plantations so the white man could get more money. The President ended slavery, but there were ways around it and everyone knew it. No one ever said any persecution of the black man is wrong for years and why not, because it was more convenient for us to ignore it. Now the people from Latin American countries have come in homes of freedom, and better lives. We tell them they have to speak English, since they are in America, but I do not recall being taught the language of the Native Americans. Since they were here first should you not have to learn that language?
Edgar Allen Poe is often thought of as being one of the most depressed and morbid American writers of all time. His fascination with death can be seen in his short stories, such as “The Masque of the Red Death”, and his poetry, such as “Spirits of the Dead”. His tragic life left him with depression, a drinking problem, a suicide attempt, and eventually, an untimely death. Though one could argue that Poe’s depression was due to his unfortunate life, his behaviors and drinking problems, coupled with his argumentative nature and lack of self control point to a personality that is high in neuroticism and low in agreeableness and conscientiousness.
Edgar Degas was born July 19th, 1834 in Paris, France. Born into wealth, Degas became well educated throughout his youth. He studied Law at the University of Paris, due to his father’s desire for him to achieve financial security on his own. However, his love for art was ever-present, even at a young age. He turned his bedroom into his own personal studio by age 18. During his time at the University of Paris, Degas met well-renowned artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who encouraged him to pursue his talent. Shortly after, Degas was accepted to the premiere Ecole des Beaux-arts ('School of Fine Arts'). Post attendance, Degas traveled to Italy for three years to continue his artistic studies. Degas life was nowhere near perfect, when he was 13 years old, his mother passed away. This caused him tremendous heartache, due to the fact that his mother was a lover of the arts; she was an opera singer and often gave recitals in their home (“Edgar Degas”). She inspired and encouraged his artistic ways.
Jose de Goya y Lucientes was born on March 30, in the year 1746, in Fuendetodos, a small village in northern Spain. At the age of fourteen he became an apprentice for a local artist, Jose Luzan. Later he traveled to Madrid where he took interest in the last of the great Venetian painters. After attempting and failing to enroll in the Royal Academy of San Fernando, Goya then traveled to Rome, Italy. Then on to Sagossa in 1771 where he painted fresco in several local churches, establishing a reputation.
The American Dream is known to be a hope for a better, richer, happier life for all citizens of every class. For almost all Americans, this entails earning a college degree, gaining a good job, buying a house, and starting a family. Although this seems wonderful, a large amount of the American population believes that the Dream has changed immensely because of increased prices in today’s society, the price of tuition being highly unaffordable, as well as the unemployment rate skyrocketing and weaker job growth. While some American citizens believe it has changed, others believe that the American Dream has not changed, but point out it is harder to obtain.
Humans often make goals to reach an exhilarated state. When a goal becomes too hard to obtain and when too many people fail to reach this goal, society digresses. The American Dream is the national ethos of the United States that was created in 1931. It is a set of principles in which prosperity and success can be achieved through hard work and the right ethics. However, over the years, the “car has stopped.” This so-called “dream” is running low and slowly turning into a fantasy. With the exploitation of an over-powering government and the reforms of education heading in the wrong direction, the American Dream is running low and is on its way to extinction.
In 1885, Munch won a scholarship to study in Paris. While in France, he began working on his realistic approach, and completed, “The Sick Child,” which was a piece reflecting on the devastating death of his sister, Sophie. He continued on with this expressionism based on painful personal experiences, and received a great amount of negative criticism.
From families looking to flee harsh living conditions in their native country to American citizens wishing to escape impoverished conditions through hard work and determination, the “American Dream” is a concept that people throughout the world have aspired to achieve for hundreds of years. Regardless of birthplace or socioeconomic status, the “American Dream” promises success, prosperity and upward mobility to any citizen with ambition and work ethic. Hundreds of millions of American citizens as well as immigrants have flourished in the United States throughout the course of history in a society with a thriving middle-class. However, in recent years, this dream has become increasingly difficult to achieve for those who are not already wealthy.
The American Dream. This concept is well known as the picture perfect family, nice house and the white picket fence. As well as succeeding and excelling in life and making the future generations lives better than the current one. This concept has contributed much of the immigration from as early as 1931 to present day. However, many immigrants immigrate to the United States in order to escape oppression as well as uprising and turmoil which may reside in their home country. Though society often places people none the less immigrants into categories from social class, heritage, and prejudice they share a common thread of hope as well as facing obstacles in their journeys and once they arrive to the states. An example of this common thread of escaping their homeland in order to pursue new experiences and hopeful new life yet experiencing different hardships are shown when looking at both the Mexicans and the Irish.
Kemper felt that his grandmother treated him the same as his mother did, therefore making it easy for him to displace his anger onto her. On one August afternoon in 1963, Kemper shot his grandmother in the back of the head with a .22 caliber rifle and stabbed her repeatedly about the body. When his grandfather returned home, he also used the gun on him shooting him as he exited his vehicle (Fisher, 2003b). This was the first murders of the future serial killer known as the “Co-ed Killer”.
The American Dream, it’s something as old as America itself and continues to live on. However, what is the “American Dream” exactly? It’s something that has changed over and over, and has been disputed over for centuries. First, it was to become the perfect society and person through God as defined by the Puritans (the first settlers in America), the it shifted to being the peak of moral and intellectual perfection with the Rationalists, who were revolutionaries such as Benjamin Franklin. The Transcendentalists are a group undefined by an era in time, for they were present in all stages of America’s history, and continue to be present. They had more modern views such as self reliance, and individualism; a continual theme we see today in what people describe as the American Dream. Besides that however, one wouldn’t see much resemblance to our country’s past ideals. Today the American Dream is all about money. As a nation we idolize people who have seemingly overcome huge life obstacles by themselves in rags-to-riches stories, and then we question why we can’t do the same. We ask ours...
American Dream is the dream of people in which everyone’s hopes for the freedom, equality and opportunity commonly held to everyone according to their ability or performance. American Dream is not only the dream but also hope of everyone who are poor, so called lower class and who struggle for their basic needs for the better and fuller and richer life with opportunity according to their skills, performance, success and capability in spite of the unexpected situation of where they born and what class they were form. American dream is not a dream but a reality to realize to live life to fullest and achieve all within and beyond with sheer knowledge, talent and all our hard work, no racism, no favoritism, and if not at all a little hindrance
1. Give an outline of how the American Dream is interpreted in text 2, 3 and 4:
Due to continuous changes in the concept of the American Dream throughout its prolonged existence, it is difficult to have one sole definition. The American Dream has always been a major concept that stems off of many ideas such as liberty, prosperity, equality, and opportunity, which still exists, to some degree, in our vision of the Dream today. America has always been known as the “land of opportunity” and has always emphasized the importance of future generations surpassing the success of their previous ones. But just because our present concept of the Dream may seem to overlap past concepts, it does not mean the Dream has remained what it was in the past. Actually, it is an entirely new image, morphed by social, political, and economic issues. What has it become? A society corrupted by materialism and deteriorated by the failing economy, leaving younger Americans hopeless and older Americans fearful of America’s future. It’s alarming that Americans are constantly taking their rights and freedom for granted, always wanting more than they can get– and quite honestly, what they can get is not even that much to begin with. As our economy collapses into chaotic hardships and our desires override our moral obligations, the American Dream has ultimately become the American Nightmare.