Read on Twitter
Mini late night rant thread, but it pisses me the off to no avail whenever I see someone say something like âthe American dream is deadâ or âthe American dream is a myth.â
See the reason I take this so personally is because both my maternal grand parents are first generation Americans, my grandmothers parents fled Poland after the end of the Great War, leaving their motherland penniless and having lost countless family members and friends.
They ended up in Pennsylvania and my great-g father aswell as his brothers and some cousins got to work in the coal mines and running a family general store. Nearly a dozen of them living under the same roof of a house they built.
My maternal grandfatherâs parents came here from Ireland, also heavily impoverished, they settled in Philadelphia and lived in poverty. My grand father lost both his parents (dad to drinking and mom to TB) before the age of 16 and left for a military academy on his own.
He served 27 years as an officer in the army, saw combat through the entirety of WW2 (North Africa, Italy, Germany) and then later moved on to work with the CIA. He met my Grand ma, found a home and put my mom and her sisters through school and college.
My father on the other hand was taken away from his parents as a infant (One Native American the other Mexican) due to them both being heavy alcoholics. He was adopted by poor immigrant farmers in CA, but left the farm at 17 to join the military, VOLUNTEERING to serve in Vietnam.
He served for close to a decade and a half before settling in AZ and meeting my mom, working his way through nursing school and building a better life than he could have ever dreamed of for my siblings and myself.
Now my families story is nothing remarkable by any standard in America, and thatâs exactly why shit like that annoys me so much. This country was built by and thrives from the endless selfless work of the untold millions of immigrants and peoples who have come to call it home.
Make your critiques of it where you will but to deny the dream that so many were willing to live, work and die for is just pissing on the grave of everyone who came here to seek a better future..
