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President Obama delivered a high energy and patriotic State of the Union address Tuesday night. This speech worked to both highlight the progress that has been made throughout his administration, as well as to bring attention to issues he intends to act upon. While the president paid tribute to American accomplishments in the past, such as wounded Army Ranger Corey Remsburg, he maintained the message that 2014 will be a year of political action to increase jobs, create equality for all, and improve wealth inequality. Although these issues have current day prevalence, many of these issues can be traced back to the colonial period of America.
President Obama spoke multiple times about the middle class and the quest to accomplish the American Dream. But the American Dream that the President speaks of is not much different than the one of the European colonizers. In the context of President Obama, the American Dream is for people to work hard, make a good living, and support a great family in an area where they are happy to live free. He also believes this dream consists of small business owners who strive to turn their hometown store into a thriving business that will lead to wealth and create more jobs. Although it sounds very distant from the American Dream of the Europeans who first came America, the backbone of this dream is the same. Particularly with the English colonists at Jamestown, their dream was to come to America to acquire wealth from gold mining and exploiting the raw materials that America had to offer. This coincides with the current day dream of becoming a successful entrepreneur. With the puritans who made up the plymouth colonies, their American Dream was to find a place where they could work hard, raise a family, and escape religious persecution so they could worship as they pleased. Even though centuries divide the America of today and Colonial America, the over arching dream and vision has not changed for what people seek to accomplish in this great country. In addition to making this dream for citizens come true, the President there must be more equal distribution of wealth, to strengthen the middle class. This can relate to the Colonies achieving their own American Dream instead of the ones that the King/Queen wanted.
Another issue that came up was the equality for women’s wages in the workforce. The President stated that it is embarrassing that women today average only 77 cents to every dollar a man makes. One of my classmates wrote in “English Colonization in the New World”, that in the English colonies, women were seen as more equal to men. This may be true, but the President highlighted that full economic equality has still not been reached and that is unacceptable.
Although the President made it very clear that 2014 will be a year of political action, The state of the Union Address made it very evident that the past America has shaped the current.