c&c (now that I have blog access!)

“The American Dream: A Biography” focuses heavily on the history of the concept and it’s scarcity today.  The idea was to emphasize freedom, a promise for tomorrow, and ultimately a sense of security.  Today, we suffer from polarized classes that demonstrate a lack of equality and proves that “The American Dream” most certainly does not apply to all Americans. The article examines the positioning of power and responsibility and rests on the value that Americans themselves have always had the power to achieve the dream, regardless.  We move to the next article which points out that the quality of the “Dream” was the sense of hope and trust.

In “Rethinking the American Dream”, we are taken on a journey of watching the evolution of “The American Dream".  That, in a different economic atmosphere, the dream was defined as having opportunity to create wealth and live a rich life-which, today, looks very different and means a lot more gain than it did decades ago.  It’s pointed out that our hunger for more grew to overshadow our sense of what we have, which may not be a problem of what we’re no longer able to do but how we have calibrated our perception of what we have and what we can achieve.

It seems that we are losing momentum with the, “You can be whatever you want!” to a more realistic, “I’m gonna be whatever I’m gonna be”.  The overinflated idea of the American Dream has seemed to pop-I feel that those of us in this proposed “Emerging Adulthood” group are perhaps not waiting for a Cinderella carriage to carry us to our castle of dreams, we are building our own idea of what it means to be happy and have a future.  I think that since we’re all a little new at writing our own story from scratch that maybe it looks a little sloppy, but at least we’re not crying about not having perfection handed to us.  There seems to be a strong theme of self-responsibility that is being upstaged by the prominent hyper-independence that we display and is perhaps quite threatening as it says, ‘I don’t need you’.

Ashley Wilhelm