Analysis Of The Article ' Sea Oak ' By George Saunders

As I read The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs it shows the most enduring conflicts in America: race, class, drugs, community, imprisonment, education, family, friendship, and love. Robs’ story is about the collision of two fiercely insular worlds; the campus of Yale University and Newark, New Jersey and the difficulty of going from one to another and then back again. This book reflects a lot about the Book “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” written by Robert D. Putnam. Putnam mainly talks about the state of upward mobility, the changes to family life, neighborhoods and schools in ways that give big advantages to children at the top and make it even harder for those below to work their way up. Putnam challenges the promise of the American Dream “that anyone, regardless of his or her origins, can have a fair start in life”. Personally as I was growing up that’s all I was taught about, this so called “American Dream” that everyone works so hard for and how hard it is to live this dream. The fear of not being able to live this dream made Rob want to do everything in his power to be able to make as much money as he can and to live this “American Dream” with his mother.

America is the land of opportunity and equality. Many people grow up believing this to be absolutely true, but Stephen Marche feels otherwise. He wrote “We Are Not All Created Equal,” arguing his point that opportunities in this country are strictly determined by the fate of ones class in society. Marche starts off making a strong case by mentioning the United States’ third place ranking for the least amount of social mobility. In further attempts to prove his point he outlines how class determines the fate of Americans place in society by comparing it’s rigid divisions to those of the aristocracy in Britain. There is a repeating idea throughout the paper that many people in the upper classes love to assume that the poor should fault themselves for their predicament due to their lack of hard work. Marche knocks that assumption out the park with statistical evidence to back up his claims. Although he made a very convincing argument with facts, he had a host of overgeneralized statements throughout the paper, which ultimately weakened his argument of class being the only determining factor of success in America.

In the short story “Sea Oak,” George Saunders presents a family that is struggling with life in the poor neighborhood of Sea Oak. The narrator works as a male stripper in Joysticks, run by Mr. Frendt. The story also revolves around Auntie Bernie, who dies, resurrects, and dies again after advising the narrator, his sister Min, and their cousin Jade to adopt unorthodox and immoral means of making it in life. Two main themes that emerge in Saunders’ work are grief and loss that people suffer in life, and how the society teaches to deal with them, including the loss of a fruitful life, lack of wealth and success, as well as death.

Since the time we are born we are fed the lies of capitalism. We are taught that capitalism hurts no one and that capitalism is the only way. Johnson and Robbins have some very influential ideas about capitalism. Johnson writes about the complexity of privilege. He also addresses why some privileged people do not feel privileged through the matrix of capitalist domination. Robbins gives us a background on how privilege became what it is today. He addresses the anatomy of the working class by drawing attention to how they were mobile, divided, powerless, and anxious for a revolution. Through Johnson and Robbins’ eyes we can begin to see how the world is not the one we were taught it was.

It is no mystery that that America has inherent issues with taking care of its lower class in comparison to many other developed countries. What is concerning is that people can work a fulltime job or may be even two jobs and still not have the resources needed to make ends meet in this society of consumption. The poor of America do not even receive even the slightest bit of sympathy and are coldly told that they should work harder as if they were not already doing that previously. Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of Nickel and Dimed, gives up her role as a member of the upper-middle class and speculates on the viability of living impoverished, detailing awful and harmful that life is, and implies much needed changes, revealing harsh injustices

Here, in the United States, the “American Dream,” is a popular belief. There is a strong relationship between hard work and success. In this perfect scenario, those who put in multiple hours are on the road to success and can move up the social ladder. Thus stating, one could be thrust into the lowest of the social status, and with some hard work, one can elevate into the world of the social elite. As a demonstration to this global view of the United States, immigrants from all over the globe have made the excursion to the “land of opportunity” in beliefs of better education, employment, government, communities, religious freedom, and lives for not only themselves but the generations that come pursuing behind them. All of this survives based on a game of social stratification – a diagram on how to successfully obtain the American dream. This observation of social class is based on many mechanisms, some of which is bestowed to people at birth, and not rewarded for hard work and dedication. The class system at play in the United States has become incredibly complex – it no longer has the fundamental class values of our forefathers. Those trying to move up in the social ladder of America are often caught replication the actions of the rich and famous, but this alone cannot make them part of the higher social class. Some think that there are simple rules to follow to climb higher into another social class ladder, but there is more to being upper class than just talking the talk or having the right identity.One way to look at class is the model developed by Janny Scott and David Leonhardt's article, “Shadowy Lines That Still Divide,” in The New York Times. They assert that “one way to think of a person’s position in society is to imagine a hand of cards. Everyone is dealt four cards, one from each suit: education, income, occupation and wealth, the four commonly used criteria for gauging class” (Scott and Leonhardt 27). While being sure on these four criteria, a basic understanding of a person’s predicted class can be made. While this model works fine for providing an elementary level of perception, it must be recognized that a person could rate well on this scale and still be in a different class than those

Contemporary society deems social class a division within a given population defined by wealth, education, and power, but the lines that divide them unceasingly deepen. Social mobility, or the movement of an individual between the stratification of societal classes, remains virtually illusory, an unattainable falsity that millions have laboriously fought for since the turn of the twentieth century. Monopolies and wage slavery remain definite and palpable, both of which contribute to immobility between social rankings, establishing an unbreakable cycle of poverty. The idyllic ethos of the American Dream, a belief that one will achieve success through hard work and opportunity, prove to be a fallacious, hollow and vague ambition that cannot be attained. Paradigms that exploit the plight of the “American worker” beginning in the early nineteen hundreds include muckraker Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The quandaries that plague the characters of the aforementioned novels parallel that of modern day exposés, such as Class Matters, by Bill Keller, Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich, and Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser, all of which harness and expose the falsehood of The American Dream as a result of wage slavery, class separation, and monopolization of major industries. The delineations that exist between the lower and upper class render the American Dream an empty, intangible delusion, unattainable to those enslaved by low wages

One of the themes of this book is that equality is difficult to achieve. The author tells readers that it is difficult for everyone to be equal by demonstrating that American society where everyone is equal. Mr.Bergeron is not average and so does some special people in the United States. The agents of the United States Handicapper General had to force to make them equal by putting them in the handicap. The author shows to reader Harrison protest to Vonnegut in the television show that system will be collapsed by more people who are intelligent and stronger. Failure of systems and individuals what author wanted to tell readers.

God, glory, and gold are the 3G’s, and that is also the main reason why the Europeans originally came to America. Today, the 3G’s still stand, but not everyone is able to achieve them and especially the immigrants. In the early colonial days, immigrants were called upon. Today they are frond upon, and are getting threaten to be deported back to their origin country. In Framing Class, Vicarious Living, and Conspicuous Consumption, written by Diana Kendall, and in The Missing Class, written by Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen. Both of these excerpts go on to talk about how the media portrays a specific class only, and how many people are forgetting about the poor working class. Today media focuses on the rich and upper middle class. For instance, they focus one Donald Trump, who is running for president. Instead of the issue of raising the minimum wage for fast food workers. The issue of raising the minimum wage is the issue of social equality. This shows the importance of how social equality is a major issue for people. Social equality has caused an inequality between the poor and rich, which has limited the opportunities for the poor working class.

Despite being its current and most popular proponent, Sanders did not invent this notion by any means. In 1962 Michael Harrington published “The Other America,” in which he argued that the problems of the American “underclass,” defined by poverty and inequality, were the result of an unregulated capitalist system, and that they could be solved only by a government that redesigned and refocused itself to promote equality and social justice.

In the article Americans Are Utterly Powerless, the former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich points out that the lack of meaningful choices is deteriorating American citizens’ basic rights, forcing them to be powerless in nearly all aspects. He argues that the fundamental goal of economy and society are supposed to be benefiting citizens. Instead, the system nowadays focuses on making the top more powerful. As a matter of fact, American citizens become hopeless for that they can account on no authorities for help. This is a social problem existing in America. However, I do not agree with him that Americans are cornered to the dead-end. Even though the society and economy changes to favor the wealthy, there are choices that Americans can make to divert the predicament of powerless.

‘Children of the Sea’ is a harrowing story written by Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American woman who expresses her personal trauma and horrors through her literature. ‘Children of the Sea’ opens with an undisclosed man writing a letter to his beloved as he travels across the sea from his home, where is lover is also writing letters directed to him. The letters they write to one another dictates the plot and reveals the two unnamed narrators lives.

The author Dinesh D’Souza briefly explains the opportunities we have and the great conditions we live in, here in America compared to other countries. In the article “What’s So Great About America” she hyperbolizes that “the point is that the United States is a country where the ordinary guy has a good life.” Furthermore, the author protests the fact we’re not equal in comparison of other countries. Here in America, we have many items we take for granted. The poor of this country can buy anything in the store and live comparatively well. Unlike other nations don’t have the same advantages as us. The less fortunate in our country have more privileges when compared to the less fortunate of the Third World countries. The Americans, less fortunate,

The author argues from how American workers are forced to take an ethical decisions to make enough to

America is not happy. The amount of individuals diagnosed with depression increases by 20% annually (Faris 1). Only 48% of Americans are satisfied with their jobs (Ben Cheng, et al 1). These facts make themselves apparent in various ways in popular culture, with examples evident in tv shows, literature, and everything in between. This is not necessarily a result of people taking the wrong courses during high school, or their employer not giving them enough benefits; the issue lies a little deeper than that. Heron Jones expresses his disdain of the higher-ups and criticizes the illusion of the American dream in “Somnambulist”. Alfie Kohn, on the other hand, stresses the