Okay...
The followin' essay is not my own, as I have invited someone, if so inclined, to contribute somethin' here in my stead. I now offer to you the resultin' piece. (But the accompanyin' image is mine- thought it sorta fit.)
Many thanks, O Mysterious Anonymous Contributor. Here ya go, y'all...
~Fish
WHAT AMERICAN DREAMS MAY COME
The American Dream. A nebulous term to say the least. Do you believe in it? How do you define it? Can you even define it?
For many Americans, this Dream is moving farther and farther outside the Realm of Reality. In some sectors, a poisonous view has even developed in regard to the Dream, one of the most substantial and long-lived concepts of our American Identity. To those people who have abandoned the American Dream, it represents nothing more than a broken promise, an incriminating stain on the Tapestry of Hope and Progress in the United States.
So, what is to explain this phenomenon? And is it, as current literature might suggest, a universal American feature? Well, we have delved into the history of the American Dream, and universality is far from what we have found. The not-too-peculiar story of one Mohan Sopori, an Indian immigrant to Lexington, Kentucky in the 1980s, shows how the view of the American Dream from one sector of our society has remained relatively unaffected by this Cultural Ragnarok. The Immigrant Point of View has persevered in holding the American Dream aloft as a vibrant beacon of potentiality, opportunity, and success in an otherwise pitch-black night of inferior alternatives.
But who’s to say that non-immigrant Americans are really that dour about what the American Dream means? Do statistics actually support the idea that modern Americans view their namesake Dream in a much more negative light than previous generations? In many ways, current trends do reflect just that.
The Washington Post conducted research on the changing tides of the American Dream in September of 2013. In addition to some startling statistics about public opinion, the Post also interviewed a run-of-the-mill, typical 2013 American, Rachel Bryant. Bryant told the Post that, despite being the American Dream herself, “It’s not what it used to be. It was a lot easier for my mom and dad to get where they are than my generation. I’m scared to death for my children… I’m worried to death over where the country is going” (Morello).
"Worried to death." This seems like some very dire rhetoric to describe a “Dream.” Could this be a sign of a developing American Nightmare? Many Americans now seem to think so. A core component of what has defined the American Dream is the idea of progress. It used to come naturally to many Americans to simply assume their children would have better lives than they had. The Post’s survey reveals, however, that only 39%—far less than half—of all Americans believe their children will enjoy better lives than they themselves have experienced (Morello).
This Dream, or Nightmare, as it were, was first defined by historian James Truslow Adams over 80 years ago, and yet perceptions have never before been so low (Morello). ABC News reports that whereas people used to view the success of the American Dream as home ownership, they now disproportionately view it as a life free of debt (Levin). Basic psychology would suggest that when an ideal changes from owning a positive to lacking a negative, a fundamental worldview has changed. Indeed, modern Americans frame their Dream in surprisingly pessimistic terms. And while this pessimism certainly does not extend to all sectors of the country, its reach is definitely troubling.
To what can we attribute this pessimistic turn? Some would indict the Great Recession and the ensuing social depression as the key culprit. ABC looks to a USA Today poll taken at the height of the pre-Recession economic boom that indicates how this negative view of the American Dream was not always the case. The poll reported that 81% of young people saw getting rich as their primary or secondary life goal, with 51% saying the same about becoming famous (Jayson). Six years and one economic crash later and these results have certainly shifted in the opposite direction. All these findings point to the variability of the American Dream. Not surprisingly, Americans define the Dream in a positive way during good times and in a negative way in hard times. Similarly, they view the Dream as attainable when things are going well, but when they take a turn for the worse, the Dream moves just out of reach. Nevertheless, such a fluctuation is to be expected.
What then can be said about the way the American Dream is perceived by different types of Americans? Our research has found that, for one group of Americans, this fluctuation hardly seems an issue; to them, the American Dream is, and always has been, an attainable and desirable goal. That group of Americans? Immigrants.
Remember Mohan Sopori, the Indian immigrant we mentioned above? Well, here’s where his story comes into play. Sopori grew up in the Kashmir region of India after independence, but his prestigious collegiate career in his home country eventually took him to fellowships across the United States and eventually, by 1984, to Lexington, Kentucky (Sopori). While he saw a career in India as one potentially plagued by the undervaluation of his skills and a lack of resources (Sopori 30:38), the United States seemed to offer Sopori every incentive to stay within its borders and achieve his own version of the American Dream. As we have seen, for those who have lived their entire lives in America, complaining about it seems to be almost second nature. The American Dream only represents anxiety about the future, the loss of opportunities and the gradual decline in America’s greatness. However, even after he had lived there for three years, America impressed Sopori enough for him to laud “How much freedom one has” in the United States. He states that “You could do almost anything…You could always interact with people from the same place” that you have come from. Sopori’s alternate experience, having grown up in Kashmir where ethnic and religious discrimination abounded and a system of “positive discrimination” had hindered his career goals, allowed him to view the quality of the American Dream through a starkly different lens. Sopori even avoided that one unique complaint that immigrants, of all people, seem entitled to these days. In his interview, Sopori stated that “No [we have not experienced any discrimination], in fact we have been very fortunate and the people have helped us quite a bit” (Sopori 34:42). Alas, even the taint of discrimination failed to tarnish Sopori’s view of his American Dream. What can we take away from Sopori’s optimism, then? His comments definitely provide a diametric contrast to those of one man named Martin who, as part of a special segment of Bill Moyers Journal dealing with views of the American Dream, claimed:
Before we can take a step forward towards the American Dream again, we need to recognize, collectively, that America has been disassembled and shipped overseas, even as we watched it all happen, believing the promises of "global expansion." Our confidence has been shot through with...betrayals, and, yes, deception... (Moyers).
Our friend Martin has the temerity to flip Sopori’s narrative on its head. To this American, (and definitely many more across the country, as studies have shown) it is the exportation of the American Dream that has diluted it for natural-born citizens. While Sopori cherished his opportunity to fulfill “every biochemist’s dream…to go to the United States” (Sopori 23:59), Martin saw the opening up of the American Dream to global citizens as “betrayal, and, yes, deception” (Moyers). But can we safely conclude that Sopori’s experience in 1984 parallels Martin’s morose description of globalization from 2009? Perhaps in this day and age Sopori would agree that his American Dream has been disassembled, too. He did gain access to the Dream via the lawful and noble path of education, after all. Perhaps immigrant views have changed since the time of Sopori’s interview.
In order to obtain a better comparison of the shift in views of the American Dream across different groups of Americans, we turned to modern surveys of the Dream in the hopes that they might place Sopori’s interview in a more current context. What we have found, however, reinforces the immutability of immigrant views of the American Dream versus the views of non-immigrant Americans.
Xavier University’s Annual State of the American Dream Survey provided exactly the kind of comprehensive data that we sought. The 2011 edition of the survey results reports that “A range of indicators concerning the direction of the country have worsened over the past year” (“The American Dream?”). However, it goes on to say that “1st and 2nd generation immigrants remain much more optimistic than the general population” (“The American Dream?”). The immigrants’ view of the future of America is also notable for remaining almost wholly unchanged, compared to the dramatic declines among the general population. Perhaps most telling, however, is the statistic that 17% more immigrants than the general population rate the American Dream as being in “good condition” (“The American Dream?”). These statistics prove that the American Dream has remained in a much higher standing among immigrant Americans than among natural-born citizens. As Sopori’s experience showed, the relative difference between immigrants’ home countries and the United States in terms of discrimination and opportunity largely accounts for this disparity in opinions.
The story of Martei Plange, a modern counterpart to Mohan Sopori, proves this assertion. Plange’s story evinces an impressively exact parallel to Sopori’s, with one key difference: Sopori told his story during the relative prosperity of the mid-1980s, while Plange recounts life in America during the height of the Great Recession. The similarity in their views of the American Dream highlights the unchanging nature of immigrant optimism toward it; the malaise that the Dream suffers in the minds of non-immigrant Americans during “hard times” remains notably absent from Plange’s story. His story, which he told in a 2010 issue of the Tampa Bay Times, mentions how the educational opportunities that he pursued as a path to American immigration paved his way to what should have been a personal American Dream, a narrative that greatly mirrors that told by Sopori. Unlike Sopori, though, Plange’s American university degrees culminated in two part-time jobs- stocking shelves and parking valet (Kruse).
However, despite what many non-immigrant Americans would view as a failure of the American Dream, Plange could only describe his experience in America by saying "In a lot of countries, you're restricted in some way, but here you don't have that… You can pretty much do whatever you want to do. You can pretty much get anything you want"(Kruse). This optimism similarly reflects Sopori’s attitude despite deriving from a time of economic hardship, showcasing the durability of the American Dream in the lives of American immigrants.
So, can we conclude that immigrants share a common experience vis-à-vis the American Dream? In a way, yes. They share experiences, though it might be the Indian upbringing of Sopori or the Ghanaian youth of Plange, that are similar in their dissimilitude from the upbringing of so many natural-born Americans in the relative abundance of opportunity and expectations in this country. The fact that immigrants so often have worse alternatives to which to compare their pursuit of the American Dream allows a greater, more positive understanding of it to develop. Maybe natural-born Americans should take a lesson from their immigrant counterparts on this one: Rather than being disappointed in failing to achieve affluence or fame, perhaps they should be content to achieve “A good life for [their] family,” a definition of the American Dream favored by immigrants more than any other sector of the country (“The American Dream?”).
In conclusion, I would like to leave you with the description of one immigrant woman, all the way back in 1944, of her experiences in America: “I found the finest of souls in all nationalities and breeds in the grandest mansions as well as the most modest huts on our prairies” (Spies).
Prairies, huh? Is there anything more American than that?
3 November 2013
(Author's name withheld by request)
Works Cited
"The American Dream? Second Annual State of the American Dream Survey." Center for the Study of the American Dream. Xavier University, Mar. 2011. Web. 3 Nov. 2013. <http://www.xavier.edu/americandream/programs/documents/Final-American-Dream-Survey-PowerPoint.pdf>.
Jayson, Sharon. "Generation Y's Goal? Wealth and Fame." Usatoday.com. USA Today, 10 Jan. 2007. Web. 3 Nov. 2013. <http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-09-gen-y-cover_x.htm>.
Kruse, Michael. "For Young Immigrant, American Dream Still Shines." Tampabay.com. Tampa Bay Times, 2 Apr. 2010.Web. 3 Nov. 2013. <http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/workinglife/for-young-immigrant-american-dream-still-shines/1084705>.
Levin, Adam. "The New American Dream: It's Not What You Think." ABC News. ABC, 8 Sept. 2013. Web. 3 Nov. 2013. <http://abcnews.go.com/Business/american-dream-longer-involves-home-ownership/story?id=20177980>.
Morello, Carol, Peyton M. Craighill, and Scott Clement. "More People Express Uncertainty in Chance to Achieve the American Dream." Washingtonpost.com. The Washington Post, 28 Sept. 2013. Web. 3 Nov. 2013. <http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-09-28/national/42479842_1_american-dream-james-truslow-adams-basic-living-expenses>.
Moyers, Bill. "What's the Future of the American Dream?" Bill Moyers Journal. PBS. N.d. Pbs.org. PBS, 13 Mar. 2009.Web. 3 Nov. 2013. <http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03132009/watch3.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pbs%2Fmoyers%2Fjournal-video+%28moyers%2Fjournal-video%29>.
Sopori, Mohan. Interview with Arthur Graham. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History.
30 Nov. 1984. Digital. 3 Nov. 2013. <http://kentuckyoralhistory.org/interviews/20651>.
Spies, J. A. "The Immigrant's View of America as I Saw It." Emmetsburg Democrat 5 Oct. 1944: n. pag. USGenWeb Project. Web. 3 Nov. 2013. <http://www.celticcousins.net/paloalto/immigrantview.htm>.
