The American Dream is a hallucination...

Well today was the first day of classes and I just got out of my first class, Intro to Sociology, earlier today. She gave us our syllabus and told us what reading requirements we had and papers and ish. Me being the productive being that I am, thought I ought to get a head start on my reading agendas. In doing so I headed for "Google Books" and found the first reading requirement; Ain't No Making It by Jay Macleod.

It was only a preview so I only read a few pages without some pages being removed for the sake of the financial well-being of the book. Mr. Macleod talked about how he attended college in a northeastern city and worked very closely with young males in a nearby project homes to empower them and challenge them to reach success. He was saying how there is a vast discrepancy between the culture on his campus to the culture in those projects. He went from very nice buildings with African Americans carrying briefcases with suits on to obviously financially conservative buildings with women in their night gowns carrying duffel bags of dirty laundry. In this community he found Freddie Pinella, an intelligent but encompassing a mind saturated with despair having young man, with no hopes to go to college and make a nice living in a middle class society. Instead he shot for the construction sites, factories, armed forces, and even the inevitable, professional football player.

Jay Macleod went on to discuss how this is opposed to the "American Dream" that Presidents, Hollywood faces and and activist hold out for the American people to capture. He was saying that there isn't equal opportunity so American Dream isn't as "genuine" as proposed. People are indubitably born into different situations and thus have a lot of different challenges, mindsets, and opportunities to seize and overcome. He hit me hard when he said that the "...the American Dream, is far from a genuine prospect,it is not even a dream. Its a hallucination."

. . . .need I say more? If I got all this out of 3 pages, I can only imagine what the book is gonna propose.

P.S. I love my class