We had to write an essay on the corruption of The American Dream in 11th grade, when we read The Great Gatsby. Gatsby himself was held up as the embodiment of the dream - nouveau riche, has a nice house, sort of gets the girl, dies a horrible death for daring to live it all out.
But, I countered in my essay, is that really the "American Dream?" By all accounts anyone who has bootstrapped themselves into the top tax bracket is living the dream through and through.
That is the corruption of the dream. The American Dream was never about getting rich . It is about leaving a legacy to your children that is better than you or your parents had.
My great grandfather was a poor German farmer who had lived along the Volga River in Russia. He and his brother and one sister left from the port at Odessa to sail to America. He married a Native American woman (although that wasn't talked about for almost a century), owned his own farm out West, and left that farm - land he actually owned - to my grandfather.
My grandfather had six sons. None of them were interested in being farmers. So after he retired, he sold the farm and settled down on the banks of the Yellowstone.
My father was in the Army, a marked improvement over being a farmer in the 1940s and 1950s. My uncles went into everything from dentistry to real estate. My father completed a bachelor's degree on the GI Bill. They had gone through one iteration of the dream - they had surpassed their parents, and the legacy of my great grandfather was that his children and grandchildren lived their own American Dreams too. They went from owning their own farmland to owning their own homes. They went from lower class to lower middle class.
My generation has once again surpassed our parents. Myself and my sisters and many of my cousins have been able to attend graduate school, some going into medicine, others owning successful small businesses. Once again, our generation has notched up - my husband and I are at median income. His family too came from farmers just two generations back.
So no, Mitt, we're not envious of your vast wealth. That isn't the dream that is being deferred. For many Americans, what has been robbed from us is the promise that the next generation will do better than we did. It is the hope that our children and grandchildren will have a legacy they can be proud of - that their parents sacrificed to give them a good education, to make sure that they had all the opportunities that their ancestors lacked.
And when those whose parents exceeded the dream beyond even Gatsby's wildest expectations are only paying a fifteen percent tax rate and still complain that their taxes are too high - and the cost extracted is at the expensive of the most vulnerable in our population, our children's precious dreams and education - that is the corruption of the American Dream.
I hope someday you read this, Mrs. Slusher.