What, after all, is the narrative of 'the American Dream?' It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I define the American dream as the ability to imagine a way that you want your life to turn out, and have a reasonable hope that you can achieve that.
The American Dream is a phrase we'll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we're redefining it now.
The American Dream is a term that is often used but also often misunderstood. It isn't really about becoming rich or famous. It is about things much simpler and more fundamental than that.
The American Dream may be slipping away. We have overcome such challenges before. To recover the Dream requires knowing where it came from, how it lasted so long and why it matters so much.
The American dream, to me, means having the opportunity to achieve, because I don't think you should be guaranteed anything other than opportunity.
The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It shows us how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if you don't compromise, you may suffer.
I think the American Dream used to be achieving one's goals in your field of choice - and from that, all other things would follow. Now, I think the dream has morphed into the pursuit of money: Accumulate enough of it, and the rest will follow.
Everybody in America started to define themselves by all these things they had around them. And all of a sudden it came tumbling down. So the old American dream has died, and that is a good thing.
Of course, preserving the American dream has always meant creating opportunity for the most recently arrived Americans - those who have come here from other parts of the globe to work hard and build a new, better life.
The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.