"Let America Be America Again"

In Langton Hughes’ poem “Let America Be America Again”, Hughes shows two different perspectives of this land; 1) a land of hope where people dream something better for themselves, a land of the free, a land of opportunity… And 2) the land of the rich, where their money and gold shines, and as it shines, it distracts others from the other side of the land, the dark part of the poor people who work the land, hidden by the rich, which take all the glory. Those are very two different views, but when America isn’t just hope, but becomes a promise, the other perspective almost becomes invisible, until the promise is broken, that is when the other view on America returns to its natural color. It seems that the second perspective is more mundane that the first.

In this poem we are also described two other Americas. There is the America we have, which is the one as the second perspective mentioned above. This America we have is the just the land of the poor (well, it would be nice if the poor owned the land, but they don’t), in which people work and rich take all the glory, a land with many dreams, but these dreams seem out far away, out of our reach. The other America described, though, is one that Hughes is making a call for this America is a land in which men can be free, where the people actually own the land (not just a couple rich people), a strong land that we shall love, a land of opportunity, a land where dreams don’t stay that way but actually become a reality.

The tone of this poem is anger, with a bit of sarcasm mixed in it. This is no surprise, though. Who wouldn’t be mad at a land that made you dream a promise, but that promise only stayed as a dream? That is also the aspects of the American Dream that Hughes criticizes. The dream never really existed for the lower class people because they were never able to achieve it. The poem also has some hope in the end, a hope that the land that is today will one day transformed to what it should be, which is how we, the people, see it as.

This poem relates very well to Fitzgerald’s criticism on The Great Gatsby because it shows how Gatsby, who was born poor, died without making his dream a reality; having Daisy. The poem speaks the truth when it says that the lower class always has a hard time reaching the American Dream. Daisy was Gatsby’s idiosyncrasy. She was his American Dream, everything that he did revolved around her. And as we try to make that dream come true, everything that we do is for that.

I, honestly, don’t agree with this criticism in my modern world. Today, the American Dream is something different for each individual. It is mainly, though, just a dream, a hope, of obtaining something better than what they have now or had in the past. Yes, we can still obtain the America Dream! It just depends on the dream itself; I guess it has some restrictions, but people can still reach it. It’s not a smart idea to reach for the stars because no one actually gets there, so maybe starting to dream small, and by slowly achieving goals, one can reach a higher dream than expected in the beginning.  We still want this dream. Deep down we always wish or just wonder if our life can be better than what it is now and we set goals to improve that, which becomes the American dream to us, because that’s what the American dream is, just our aspirations with an actual possibility to be realized in this country.