Gregory Mantsios: The American Dream

The American dream can be achieved by education, opportunity, and hard work, but is this is not a reality, but just merely a dream. Opportunity in American feels as if everyone has a fair chance of being successful. In America, it seems that the idea of everyone has a fair chance to opportunity. But this is not the case, in Gregory Mantsios essay “Class In America-2012” he talks about how there are many myths that are wide spread about the differing classes in America. Then he further goes on disproving the widely proclaim myths with stats that show in real world the gap between the wealthy one percent of the population owning 36 percent of the capital in comparison to the 99 percent of Americans in the U.S. For the purpose of this essay, the

This idea about becoming multimillionaires over a short period of time or mere hard work has been wide spread through success stories of people’s achieving opportunity in spite of the disadvantages that everyone else has. It seems that in America people are willing to believe any success story that they hear and because of this it gives many Americans a false image of the real world or life. Many people see champions like in boxing for instance, to be complemented with fame, money, and better life while doing what they enjoy the most, but they fall short to realize that there can be one champion. It success stories like these that Mantsios in “Class in America-2012” says that the media has a terminus influence on the perspective of success stories and suggests that Americans live in a facade going from nothing to extremely wealthy society (391). What this shows is that through the use of media people are becoming blind to the idea it will take much more than hard work to achieve upper class status. Because of this blindness, the rich will keep getting richer while everyone else will spend their lives falsifying hope that one day they too will achieve upper class levels status. In the film Trading Places, Ophelia says, “[reading Louis ' palm] You 've never done a day 's work in your life” (trading places). In the film, Luis lived a privileged life where he did not have to do labor-intensive work for a living in comparison to the upper class Americans. The film clearly demonstrates that the idea is falsified, since it can be concluded that the people in the upper class (the one percent) do not work hard at all and still make tons of money