“What Is America?”
One of the original characteristics of the Founding Fathers’ “American Dream” is the freedom and opportunity to be educated. The American public-school system is notorious for this liberty. It allows citizens to receive knowledge so they can apply it towards their dreams, which supports the American Dream. This acclaimed idea is what renamed the USA as the “Land of Opportunity”, as people are encouraged to chase their goals.
However, today America is seen differently. These proclaimed principles are not seen as attainable as they once were. People soon realized that achievement relies heavily on others. One aspect of public-schooling which is often overlooked is its ability to instill conformity into a social hierarchy. As the saying goes, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. Due to this change, society shifted into a mock high school of sorts, with different cliques and social groups constantly fighting for the top spot. Of course, individuals crave their own success, however Americans have divided themselves into subgroups according to their socioeconomic class to get ahead of others. America’s social order resembles a high school social stratification system where the objective is to rise to the top within your clique.
Within a high school, different social groups compete to pursue dominance over the others. They use repressive tactics to maintain power once they received it. This exploitation is what prevents the majority of Americans from being able to cross into another class. Although there are exceptions, the majority of social movement is within the barriers of one’s specific strata, which is the only plausible advance for the majority of people.
As P.R. Sarkar comments on this ideology, he states,
“To overcome this tyranny and exploitation, movements will have to be launched for those suppressed people so that they can stride boldly forward, fight against all exploitation and attain economic independence”(Socioeconomic Movements)
These overpowering cliques are limiting the success of others, and the only way to eliminate this issue is by a movement where the powerless become the powerful. My solution of how America should approach this is by focusing less on these groups and looking at people individually. America should be a place where achievement depends on the work and skills one person has, instead of their personal connections to social groups.
Often people’s prosperity depends solely on if they know someone in a higher position either within their socioeconomic group or in the group above them. In my idealistic America, this track would be obsolete and one’s work effort and experiences is what propels them ahead. One possible pathway towards change could be a government regulated employment office for all workplaces, which hires people without being influenced by a bias, and places them in open job positions. Owners will continue to have the power to fire people as they do today, however the hiring will be done by this office which will look at people’s resumes and not their social class. In this model, owners will be forced to give up some of their power. There may be backlash since they worked to rise to their leadership position, but it is necessary to equal the opportunity for everyone to meet their goals. are other problems with the reliance on socioeconomic classes pertaining to individual achievement, but this proposal is a starting point.
Prbhkr. “Socioeconomic Movements.” PROUT Globe, 14 June 2011, proutglobe.org/2011/06/socio-economic-movements/.
I like the way you mentioned the “renamed” country, because when I read it, I thought immediately about how it’s not so “land-of-opportunity-ish” as we would hope.
Then you went right into how we DON’T see it as the America we live in.
I like the built-in quote, it makes the blog look VERY put together, and it looked very clean as well!
I like that the whole point of the blog was to discourage power struggles and discrimination, because it definitely is a very big problem today! Nice job!
While it’s easy to say that we should be empowering the powerless its harder to put into practice. How would you suggest doing it? It’s very difficult to gauge how the power is given and you need to ensure that both parties would then have an equal amount of power or else you just end up with the previous scenario but with the roles reversed.
I dont think that America has lost its spot in a social pecking order of nations. There are certainly issues of social mobility that plague the country, but America is still a place where achievement depends on the work and skills of a person. There are many socio economic barriers that prevent people from getting the education they deserve but that is definitely less true now than it was 100 or 50 years ago. Additionally, the government has cared to regulate employment practices and has outlawed discrimination in employment for a host of protected classes.