My Idea of the American Dream: Aubri O'Connor

Transcript:

Hi, my name is Aubri O'Connor, I am the Executive and Artistic Director of Nu Sass Theater. I'm also our Chief Producer.

The things that I have done have been very strange for the people where I come from. I say this because I was taught the American dream of those people. And it's a very, bootstrappy Irish, Polish, French, Italian, immigrant idea of the American dream where like your grandparents are dirt farmers, like literally dirt potato farmers, and the big upgrade for their children was instead of an out house, indoor plumbing and electricity getting run to the house. And then the big upgrade for my generation was I get to go to college. Like maybe we are up to our eyeballs in debt for the rest of our lives. But like, it's this idea that like incremental wealth and incremental positivity and that it takes time and you have to work hard the entire time for it. But you can do it if you work hard. And of course that's the trap that so many of us in America are stuck in, because the idea is that if you're not succeeding, it's because you're not working hard. So I have some real issues with the idea of the American dream. I still love it. Like I inherently am an American. I am deeply patriotic of our nation, and I want us to succeed and to offer success to all of our citizens. But I want us to look more critically at like how we're defining our citizens and how we're defining success and why we are offering more success to people who worked less hard for it than we are offering success to people who are working harder than anyone for it.