Paradoxical Country

he United States is perceived by many to be the ideal country. A land of opportunity where all your dreams can come true and as some say, “money grows on trees”. Although it is true that we project this image of ourselves as wealthy successful and happy to the world, in many cases it a false ideology that few can obtain. We base ourselves as a country on freedom and the ability to have control over our own lives. When in reality this is not entirely true. Some say that we have a paradoxical country and in order to assess the validity of this statement we must first create an understanding of the word paradox itself. Often confused with the word hypocrisy, paradox is a complex word that can have a slew of meanings. Hypocrisy involves a personal
This was said by the founding fathers when fighting for independence from the British. If you stop to assess the statement in regards to that time period alone you can find two major examples of paradox. First is the war itself. We were fighting a war against a country that saw us as a lower class os citizen. This shows that we were fighting for something that already was not a reality. The second is slavery. Both before and after the war we had slaves. There are ample examples of how we treated them as lesser beings, starting with the name of slaves. We saw ourselves as being held in bondage by the british, but even after we won independence we kept others in bondage worse than what we had experienced. Some can argue that this was different because it was a different time period then and slavery was held a societal normality. This may be true but when you look at how it progressed not much has changed. Even though there was the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. racism is still very real. Society sees african americans as lesser people. Statistically they have more challenges getting jobs, loans, and even an education than whites. Individually we may not see ourselves as racist, but it has been deeply embedded in our society. In the book Macho we are shown how Caesar Chaves is fighting for the equality of mexican immigrant workers. This is a similar story
This statement was said more a public relations slogan than i reality of the time. In early colonial times your rights were directly related to your wealth and the amount of land you owned. From here we find our earliest “true” ideal as a country. Money equals power. The wealthy held influence and used this statement to gain the support of the lower class. This is another example of how men were not created equal. Some will say that this was the true ideals of the men in those times but many of the men who instigated the revolution were wealthy merchants who stood to gain the most from independence. Without the help of the farming class (due to their manipulation and trickery) they would have been powerless. Today money still holds the same weight, Although the average person now has more say, the wealthy still have the power. The celebrities and famous people are the ones with the most influence. In the book Ceremony, the separation of people is shown when the main character visits a holy man, While there he sees how the native americans are seen as a lesser group of people and are separated to the outskirts of the city. Because of this separation they have less rights than the people who are permitted to live within the city. A good example of people having less rights are the mexican immigrant workers. As portrayed in the book Macho the workers have virtually no