Singhal: To me, what the American dream is, is that, no matter what your background is, what country you’re from, what income background you’re from, no matter what, you can be anything you want to be. And for the most part that’s true, as long as you work hard enough in this country I think you can get where you need to be.
Journalist: The economy may be tanking, but according to a new national poll by the New York Times and CBS News, the American dream is alive if not entirely well. If that sounds contradictory, well, it is. On a sunny spring day we asked some people in New York City for their impressions of the American dream.
Mendez: I think for me the American dream is to have a great family and a great home on the beach somewhere and just have enough means to support myself and my family.
Pierce: I wanna become a lawyer, and then I wanna be a judge.
Cates: Well I think it's being able to have the opportunity to, you know, meet your dreams, achieve, er, whatever success or however far you wanna go in life.
Journalist: But achieving it is another thing.
Mendez: Um, I’ve still got a little work to do, I think we all do, I don’t think we ever really stop.
Cates: I definitely do not think I’ve achieved that yet!
Journalist: Less than half of the people in the Times/CBS poll said they had achieved their dream. And even for people here, in affluent midtown Manhattan, the longtime dream of upward mobility can be elusive.
Fine: When I was growing up in nearby Patterson, an old industrial town, the American dream was that, whatever your origins, if you work very hard, and if you were a little bit lucky, that things could be fine for you and better for your children. It was palpably available to people, and now it’s just not.
Toler: It was about hope, like, that you could build towards a future and you’d save a little bit each year and by the end you’d have enough for retirement, you could raise a family, could put your kids through school, you could take a vacation, take care of your elderly parents. The last couple of years it seems to be like, it’s up in smoke, or up in (clear default drops???)
Journalist: Here’s something kind of puzzling. The nation is in a recession, but the poll showed that more people think they’ve achieved the American dream now than had four years ago. Why is that? Experts say, that when times are hard, people shift their definition of the American dream. It becomes more about values like freedom and opportunity, and less about things like material success.
Goosens: In my opinion, what the American dream is, is coming here from another country like me and just trying to achieve what you want – there’s no, not so many boundaries I think as where I come from back in Belgium. So for me that’s a lot of freedom, and that makes me happy.
Journalist: And some people are already living the American dream. Because their parents achieved it for them.
Lee: Well I guess for maybe a first generation immigrant, we have achieved the dream. Other people in our situation in other countries probably would dream to be in our shoes.
Journalist: This is Katharine Seelye for the New York Times.
Thanks a lot Flemes !