To get your work boots on your feet 200 or so years ago, you would stand up and grab two small leather flaps on the sides, known as bootstraps, and pull the boot up. From this everyday activity, the idiom "to pull yourself up by your bootstraps" was born-and with it, a torturous myth that true success meant getting ahead on only your energy and steam, without help from your family, government, or community. While it was initially understood to be an absurdity, over time it became a phrase that millions of people take seriously. The phrase is now, arguably, the basis of the American Dream and its embrace of an individualism that shades into a brittle self-sufficiency.
For years, I have been struck by how much the self-made myth shapes public opinion and policy. As a reporter focused on inequality, I frequently see this relentless individualistic stance, even in the messages I receive from readers about how the poor are responsible for their own scarcity, strangers wagging their proverbial fingers at "single mothers" or people who've been evicted. They are following decades of instructions that Americans have to accomplish everything on our own, from poor r women being called "welfare queens" during the Reagan era to today's Republican politicians opposing college-debt relief as "a debt-transfer scam."
But there is also a very different version of the American Dream from this one. It's closer to what was first imagined by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book on the subject-more inclusive, more communitarian, and less singular. It's catching on. You can see it in the rise in the number of people joining-or attempting to create-new unions, and in the range of citizens now helping decide the budgets of their local governments. These are just two examples of the new American Dreamers that taken together show that collective action and community-focused activity are growing in popularity.
Esta historia es de la edición March 13 - 20, 2023 (Double Issue) de Time.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición March 13 - 20, 2023 (Double Issue) de Time.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Kate Winslet Puts Lee Miller in the Frame - Kate Winslet loves tables. She loves them so much that the Oscar-winning actor collects them.
Kate Winslet loves tables. She loves them so much that the Oscar-winning actor collects them. There is nothing fancy about these antiques, but they enchant her. "It's the knots and the whorls, the shape and feel," she says. "They can feel like old friends, and there is something emotionally charging about an old table that comes with a history-I find imagining what that might be enormous fun."
Alfonso Cuarón Goes Long - The Oscar-winning filmmaker finds pathos in our lonely present in his first TV miniseries
A perceptive, generous-spirited child draws on her imagination when she's subjected to the cruelty of a boarding-school headmistress. A lone astronaut, cradled in a damaged space capsule and having lost any hope of returning to Earth, experiences a hallucination that saves her life. A young household servant, abandoned by the man who's gotten her pregnant, miscarries-though his betrayal helps her define what family truly means to her. Loneliness, so universal it has virtually become trademarked the Human Condition, is everywhere in art, and in life: we tend to fetishize it, or at least dab it with a perfume of sentimentality. But Alfonso Cuarón, now more than 30 years into a wide-ranging career that spans pictures like the Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation A Little Princess, the space reverie Gravity, and the memoir-as-film drama Roma, is more interested in subtle emotional textures, in gradations of feeling that are always specific to the character at hand yet also joltingly recognizable. And now he brings his big-screen, big-story gifts to a limited series, an adaptation of Renée Knight's 2015 psychological thriller Disclaimer.
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Innovators
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Leaders
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Advocates
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Phenoms
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
TIME 100 NEXT The World's Rising Stars - Artists
From the halls of power to recording studios and science labs, these rising stars are remaking the world while defining the next generation of leadership
THE NEW APPRENTICE
J.D. Vance's juggling act
Fear in Lebanon, and a new front
FIRST, ON SEPT. 17, THERE WERE exploding pagers.
The hunt for life on a moon of Jupiter begins
NEARLY HALF A BILLION MILES FROM EARTH, A WORLD may be stirring.
