The American Dream has originated and continued to be focused on making a life for yourself where you could not have done in your home country. I believe that life and our current society has altered this image. The rich, or the top 10%, has committed so many crimes but avoid the whole process of sentencing or even time incarcerated.
Let’s take in consideration the most recent news breaking incident that included celebrities. The first that comes to mind is the issue between Lori Loughlin paying for her daughter Olivia Jade’s entrance into USC. Olivia is a Youtube personality, who has consistently stated that she just wanted a college experience and has multiple videos of her missing school for vacations or parties. This broke news because Lori is OUR Aunt Becky! The aunt we all wished for when we watched Full House as children. In reality, is Loughlin really going to do time? Most likely, she is going to pay to get out of these crimes and or do some community service.
While on the other hand, we are putting away people for serious time for committing crimes that are much less controversial but because they cannot afford an attorney, they must deal with being incarcerated. We may see people commit a crime they may not know is a crime in hopes of benefiting their family for the American dream. But what do they actually get? Time locked up. We have famous and wealthy celebrities paying for their children to get admitted into well known universities, where as undocumented students who are trying to get degrees in hopes of taking their family out of poverty are being arrested or are not allowed to continue to enroll in classes.
What happened to the great American dream?
I feel that this is one of our largest crimes within America: the falseness of the American Dream. In modern day American, the ability Olivia Jade getting paying to get into the college she wanted without any sort of merit just proves the way that institutions pick and choose who is granted opportunities in our world. It’s only those who have the resources to succeed that are able to, and American society does not provide the proper resources the way it advertises to us. The fact that there are so many student out there suffering and clawing their way up to get a decent education proves that we’ve failed in our creation of the American dream. This is a topic that needs to be discussed more. Typically we talk about celebrity corruption and crime on our streets as separate issues, when they should really be discussed in conjunction because it allows us to see the larger picture of our issues as a society. We’ve got to get our priorities back on track, and I thank you for inspiring us to think about the larger implications of the American Dream in the modern day.