Greed, an American Epidemic

Greed, an American Epidemic
In my Introduction to Literature course, I teach the play Death of a Salesman. It is the story of Willy Loman’s slow decent toward suicide due to his constant pursuit of the “American Dream.” Loman measures his worth in dollars and cents and is unable to deal with his decline in the business world. He can no longer keep up with the “Jones’” and this causes him to ferry into madness. At the end of the play, after Willy’s suicide, it is made known that his wife has paid off the last of the payments on their house. She says over and over again, “We’re free. We’re free.”
The American capitalist system is making a Willy Loman out of all of us. Daily, we are surrounded by advertisements that beckon us to buy more, spend more. We are raised on the idea that to own a home is the measure of success. This pressure to be the ultimate consumer might be fine if wages and the lifestyle of the average worker could support it. We are living in the age of the diminishing middle class and, for that matter, the upperclass. The vast majority of workers make little, their raises do not keep up with the rising cost of products, and their wages cover few of luxuries we’re constantly told we need to pursue to be a good American.
The problem with the American economy is greed. The few upperclass want to maintain and keep increasing their money and power. So, they offer their workers small raises and wages and continue to increase the cost of products sold. This is good for their bottom line. Of course, that is until we bottom out. The gap between the rich and the poor is widening, and, to be honest, a large number of people who deem themselves middle class are operating under a delusion. “61 percent of American households always or usually live paycheck to paycheck” (Snyder). This is not the comfortable standard of living required for a person to title themselves middle class.
There are those that argue that the people in power, the people holding the purse strings, deserve to call all the economic shots. They are the successful ones. They are the ones that “worked hard for their money.” They have the education, the know how. They deserve to be on top. The people who argue this are America’s perfect patsies. They take food from their own mouths when they say this and perpetuate the cycle of poverty in this country. We were founded under the idea that everyone is entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” As more and more people slip from any semblance of economic comfort and fewer and fewer people control the wealth in this country, perhaps we should revise that phrase to be “existence, liberty, and the pursuit of the next meal.”