The Melting Pot

The Melting Pot

The American Creed is soup. I believe that America should be a place where people can follow their dreams. People have the opportunity available to them to pursue the career and lifestyle that they want. It won’t just happen overnight or be given to them, it takes the right balance of “ingredients”. The list I have come up with sums up most of the “ingredients” needed to succeed. This includes: support, unity, patience, education, creativity, intelligence, equality, hard work, and most of all, passion.

Without passion nothing could work. You could have the perfect balance of ingredients and have all the opportunity available to you, but nothing would “mix” together. Just like how in order to mix the ingredients in a pot of soup, you need heat. Otherwise, the pot would just sit there, you could mix all you want, and you wouldn’t be making soup. Harriet Tubman was a slave in the 1800’s, who escaped slavery and then went back thirteen times to rescue more people from slavery. This women risked her life to follow her dream to abolish slavery and believed that “you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world” (qtd. MSN 15). She did not stop for anything, nothing was handed down to her. She gave out her three “key ingredients” and her life story shows that passion is key role in succeeding in your dreams. She had to face obstacle after obstacle, and risked death.

Obstacles always seem impossible when you are right up to them, and they always seem to be the things that could ruin your dream. Frederick Douglass was a man who faced many obstacles and persevered through much hardship. Fighting through slavery and then escaping and continuing to fight by becoming a national movement leader. He believes that “if there is no struggle, there is no progress” (qtd. MSN 2). In order to learn and grow, you need to get through struggle. Overcoming obstacles is what builds perseverance, strength, intelligence, and creates change. When you are stirring up soup it will not be easy. If you want a good soup, then you have to work hard constantly for hours to make sure the temperature is right, the ingredients are mixing, and that you have the right balance. There are all these things in our lives that could stop us from achieving our dream.

I could go on and talk about every one of these ingredients, but it is different for every recipe. Some people may not need as much creativity, and some may heavily depend on it. The most important ones are passion, patience, equality and education. Those last two correlate very much. A nation can have best education in the world, but if it isn’t equally distributed, what is the point? Everybody has a dream, and everybody deserves opportunity to follow that dream. A key part of opportunity is education. I believe that “good education has the power to change a life” (Pearson 1). Education opens up the door to so many dreams and so many things. The importance of education is a fact. A problem that America is facing is the diversity in the quality of public education, like high schools or state colleges. Equality in opportunity is very important for people to follow their dreams.

The last crucial thing to soup is the water. The thing that holds everything together, that allows the ingredients to mix. You can put all these ingredients in a pot and heat them up, but you need water. These are laws that protect your rights, freedoms, and equality. Everybody needs access to water, needs laws that allow them to follow their dreams. These laws should be “just laws,” laws that “uplifts human personality” (MLK Birmingham letters 1). America should be a place with a warehouse full of ingredients and have a huge reservoir of water. It should be a place where people are uplifted and can have the chance to freely live out their dreams.

Works Cited

King Jr., Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” University of Pennsylvania , 2019.

Universal History Archive. “16 Inspiring Quotes from the Civil Rights Movement.” 16 Inspiring Quotes from the Civil Rights Movement, Microsoft News, 1 Feb. 2016, www.msn.com

Pearson. “The Importance of Education.” The Importance of Education, Pearson, 2019, www.pearson.com