Rereading America 3

After reading the story of Dick the boot-shiner, I realized how pathetic this story is. It may make for a good children’s book or something, but it is anything but near reality. Alger does a great job of creating false hope for anyone living in poverty that reads his stories. Dick’s success at the end of the story may, in actual reality, happen to about one and five thousand people. Though it is a good idea to encourage people to make a better life for themselves, it’s easier said then done. It’s so difficult to get out of poverty.
In most cases, most people don’t have a “Dick success story”. They don’t just go out one day, save someone and the person they save actually has a rich daddy who wants to reward them and give them a great job and that pays extremely well. That’s unrealistic.
At the end of the tale, Dick’s friend Fosdick suddenly gets a raise on his job and so he and Dick want to go buy a new apartment. Yeah, that doesn’t happen. Asking for a raise at McDonald’s is like someone in hell asking for water. Even if a raise is granted to them, it’s not significant at all. In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara wasn’t able to make living with one, even two or three jobs. Finding a place to stay was one of the hardest things for her. The rent was so high, so that consumed most of her money each month, then she still had to worry about food and bills to pay for.
Horatio Alger gives Dick this attitude in the story that basically says “Oh as long as I work hard, everything will fall in place in the end. I will be wealthy as long as I continue to work like a little robot boot shining. Well that’s a big, fat lie. Any poverty stricken person can work as hard as they want, but most likely they won’t be gong anywhere. Our American society wasn’t set up for the working class to succeed. It is set up in a way to keep people in a life of servitude. I don’t know if our government is trying to brain wash the poor into thinking that there is actually an American Dream available for them, when in reality the working poor are being used for their man power. They are only there to serve others by our society’s standards. To be looked down upon and thought badly of. Society doesn’t want there to be hope for them because the only thing America is concerned about is the almighty dollar. And it doesn’t matter who it hurts in the process to get to that money. Yeah, then we want to go feed people in Africa and act like we care. In Cruz’s argument, he says that no matter how great of a worker he was, he wasn’t ever going to have a job as manager. For all the companies he worked for, they all did the same thing, they built him up with false hope of maybe one day becoming manager, but in reality they knew they could never have anyone of a different ethnicity put in a place of power. Gotta love America!