Kancof

Is it American? The American Dream is one that gathers many under its wing and carries them to its completion. But it is also a nightmare; a system of standards that one may not live up to and may not even be capable of realizing. Millions upon millions have come to America to discover this dream and live it themselves. How many of those are living like Gatsby, the personification of the American “Dream”? The American Dream is exactly that: an American one. Someone out there is incapable of accepting anyone but fifth generation American citizens as American and chooses to pass judgment on and scorn those that have immigrated here, searching for the American Dream, as it has been presented to them. Because of the judgment that is passed and the scorn received, many find the American Dream, as Gatsby originally did, an unimportant and useless thing to chase, because, after all, it is so much easier and more interesting to tell people of your plans and what you are going to do than to actually go out and follow through. The American Dream is no longer and never really has been what it is popularly personified to be. The American Dream is exactly that: a dream; a dream that is supplied to Americans so they can know what they’re headed for, where they’re supposed to be going, and what their final goal will be, because they cannot dream for themselves. The real American Dreamers are the immigrants that sit at the gas station and wait to be picked up. The real American Dreamers are the ones you never see, because they’re cleaning the kitchen at your local fast food restaurant. They’re picking up your trash, they’re cleaning your parks, cutting your lawns, they’re working hard so you can enjoy what you believe to be the real American Dream, but you never dream. You’re not the dreamer, you’re the consumer. You sit around and preach to yourself and your friends about the real American Dream that you’re living and you’ve built up all by yourself. And in a way, it really is the true American Dream: to live off the work of others.

The goals set by each person are all fundamentally similar. They all include a white-collar job with a six figure salary and a beautiful wife to bear you two wonderful children. We’ve all been promised something of this sort all of our lives. We’ve all been raised to believe that one day we’ll all be rock stars, the president and whatever we want to be, but we won’t. And one by one, we realize this and wonder at how important our lives actually are. We have failed to achieve the American status-quo and wonder what we’re still doing here. People wonder why there are so many drugs out there. People wonder why there are so many suicides. People wonder why there are so many mental troubles that people face day in and day out. People wonder at all of this and fail to realize that it is the result of broken promises and lives that are deemed worthless by the inhabitant because of his inability to live up to what is expected of him. No one goes out to change what children are taught, no one goes to the sources, everyone points to the end result, the broken and forgotten men and women that live on the street, smoking crack, and sleeping in boxes, and arrests and blames them in order to “correct” and punish, not educate and prevent. Children believe what you tell them and at the same time can spot a lie. Have a little dignity and reveal to them the world. They can understand.

The people in The Great Gatsby are some of the few that have achieved the superficial American Dream. They’re rich; they earn more money in a month than East Timor does in a year. When a man reaches the level of being so far above his fellow men, he has nothing left to do, nowhere left to go and he has reached the epitome of what he thought that he wanted, he feels that something has been stolen. But what’s missing? He realizes deep on the inside that something is missing; something urgent and necessary to his happiness. To solve such a problem, he gets a wife, has children. Happily married, he still longs for something. He goes to parties such as Gatsby’s to fill this void with alcohol and gossip. He drowns his shame with the shame of others through gossip and provides for the others a way for them to feel better about themselves and add more stories to their gossip repertoire by getting drunk. Although suffering is normally associated with scarcity and deprivation, there is a different type of suffering that’s caused by plentitude: to have everything you could ever want and still not think that it is enough.

What has happened in this world to cause the dreamers to support the lives of the lechers and then be arrested and sent away for daring to live the American (only) Dream?

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