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The American Dream, once revered as an attainable, an almost holy icon of American culture, now found itself subject to scrutiny. Gatsby exemplifies the man who obtains, at least for awhile, the outward trappings of financial wealth only to see the empire he envisions for himself ultimately fail to materialize.

That this narrow aperture should grow from a heap of ashes and refuse suggests that in the triumph of the industrialized, commercialized, and banalized world to come, the American dream of open horizons and limitless possibilities would be reduced to a burned-out, undifferentiated mass.

"It does speak to contemporary America," says David Dowling, author of a students' guide, The Great Gatsby in the Classroom. "Especially that so-called American Dream, that stereotype that everyone can succeed if you try hard enough.

The only viable option to save the human species from self-immolation – ending our dependence on fossil fuels – is ignored by the industrialized world’s power brokers, who have shredded the tepid climate agreement made at Kyoto.

The last thin hope for reform and reversal will come through sustained acts of civil disobedience and open defiance of the formal systems of power.

Life is short. We all die. Nearly all battles for justice will long outlive us.

It is not easy for the Black America to empower itself when all the odds appear to be against the community. Many members of Black America find themselves being afraid to participate openly in the political and economic processes that might empower the Black Community. This fear has led many in Black America to believe that they must exhibit a racelessness persona in order to achieve vertical mobility in America.

Education is a tool that Black America must use for social change, to educate its youths, and to correct the mis-education of and about the Black Community.

lack educators and writers must commit themselves to helping Black America define itself. The capacity to untangle the complex racial, social and cultural human experiences in the United States of America, that helped to define Black Americans, seems to elude the Black Community. Educators are needed to help untangle the meaning of racial stratification and its impact on the Black identity (politically, socially, culturally, and economically). Thus the identity of the Black Community suffers.

On the surface of The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald portrays a romantic love between a man and a woman, but inside the real meaning is much deeper. Fitzgerald depicts the 1920’s as a time of decay social and moral values, evidence of this is the greed and the pursuit of pleasure. Jay Gatsby’s constant parties epitomized the corruption of the American Dream as the desire for money and worldly pleasures overshadowed the true values of the American Dream.

It’s written in the American Constitution that every individual has the right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”. This right it seems has taken a twisted turn in the early 1920’s.

. These materialistic values consequently led the decay of the American Dream. The new American Dream described by Fitzgerald portrays a world where greed, the pursuit of money and pleasure are above all else. Fitzgerald portrays a world that has lost its way in the corruption of the American Dream.

The yearning to bridge this gap is most persistently and most romantically evoked in Fitzgerald, of course, in characters like the former Jay Gatz of Nowhere, N.D., staring across Long Island Sound at that distant green light, and all those moony young men standing in the stag line at the country club, hoping to be noticed by the rich girls.

Some novels trade on class anxiety to evoke not the dream of betterment but the great American nightmare: the dread of waking up one day and finding yourself at the bottom.

the notion that wealth and privilege are somewhat crippling conditions: if they don't make you an out-and-out twit, they leave you stiff, self-conscious and emotionally vacant until you are blessed with a little lower-class warmth and heart.

hen inequality is high and growing rapidly, luxury purchases are sometimes as hard to ignore as a seven- foot sixth grader.

When "The Great Gatsby" was first published in 1925, income and wealth disparities were at record levels. It is thus no mystery that F. Scott Fitzgerald's saga of wealthy Americans during the Jazz Age became an instant best-seller.

But since then, it has again been rising sharply. Disparities today are once more at record levels, which may help explain the resurgence of interest in Gatsby.