50% rant, 50% philosophy, 50% listening to The Imperial March from Star Wars. 150% I kid you not!

The topic this week is to discuss the American Dream as an ideology.

My father really and truly believed in the American dream. My family was working class at the end of the second world war. My grandfather, Samuel, had dropped out of high school during the Great Depression to support his mom and siblings after his father's death with an apprenticeship to a machining shop. He enlisted in the army after Pearl Harbor, earned a purple heart and a clover for wounds suffered campaigning in Europe, and returned home to his wife, Clementine, who he'd married merely months before the war started. He worked with his uncle in the machining shop until he left to start his own shop that also did roofing. My aunt and two uncles were all born during this time, and then ten years later, in 1960, my father was born. My family all agrees that it was the roofing business generated in the wake of 1965's Hurricane Betsy that allowed my family to rise to the middle class. My grandfather could then afford to send his son Kenneth (born in 1950, my youngest uncle) to college in 1968. When he graduated in 1973, he was the first genetically related member of my family on my father's side to have graduated from college. I say all that because my Aunt Veralyn, the eldest of my father's siblings, married a Tulane architecture grad. Anyway, my oldest uncle, Sammy (named after his father) took over the roofing business. When my dad graduated from college in 1983, he got a good job with Amoco petroleum, and my entire family had, within a generation, raised itself to the ranks of the middle class.

On the other hand, my mother had dropped out of high school to get married and have my older sister, Katie, with her first husband. They divorced a year later. She eventually got her GED, but she was working as a waitress at a bar named La Boucherie in the French Quarter when she met my dad, they fell in love, and got married. Five years later, VOILA! I appeared. Even after my parents divorced, my father incurred quite a bit of debt to make sure that he kept custody of me and maintained our middle class lifestyle. He has worked for ExxonMobil since I was three months old, and his pay bracket now places him at upper-middle class. As soon as our incurred debt is paid off in a few years, my family will, in short, be upper-middle class, from how his father started out as working class.

Because of this, my father truly believes in the American Dream. Anyone can make anything out of themselves if they try hard enough. I do not remember a time when I was not expected to go to college. My family saw college as the key to getting ahead in the world, and much of my education occurred in gifted/talented or honors courses in public school in a good suburb of Houston because of the high educational expectations placed upon me. College was not an option, and there has never been a time in my life where I haven't believed that I could not do something. If I wanted to run a multi-billion dollar international corporation, then I would somehow work my way up the corporate ladder, making the invaluable connections along the way that I needed. I wanted to be an ambassador, which involves knowing the right people in D.C. Yeah, I can do that. Never was I told I couldn't do anything, except be a princess or a queen because that takes a lot of elbowing and right marriage. Short of royalty, however, the world is my oyster.

So I've been raised to believe in the American Dream. I pin my hopes upon it. But I see my step siblings, Rebekah and Jimmy, and even my half sister, Katie, and for them somehow the dream has failed. Katie squandered her chance at a half-ride to a small satellite of A&M, and now she's 27 and putting her way through nursing school after having boomeranged into my mother's house. She used to be a role model, and now I look at her and she that she's wasted the majority of her twenties and is still not what she wanted to be. And Jimmy... he graduates from high school in a few months. He still has not taken the SATs. Will he get in anywhere? Will it be community college for him? He wants to join the Air Force, but he's considered overweight. He's a black belt in Karate... so I don't think so. And my youngest sister, who's sixteen, is barely passing her classes and wants to be a beautician. I look at my life and I wonder why I ended up being so classically successful and they didn't or might not be... and it was that I was always told there was nothing I couldn't achieve. My three siblings were constantly discouraged, and now their parents are frustrated that they aren't making the most out of their life like I am. Well... I think the American Dream is possible, but only if you parents tell you so. Only if it's part of your worldview. You need to believe in the American Dream and devote everything to it for it to become your American Reality.

Sorry for being long-winded and voicing some of my familial frustrations here. Hopefully you get where I'm coming from though....
~Secret Surfer