America was initially supposed to be a classless society, one where everybody got an equal opportunity to succeed and thrive, right? At least that’s what my parents thought when they were trying to win the visa lottery to come to NYC. I can just picture their innocent, naive faces filled with all these fantastic hopes and dreams of the city as they boarded the plane to NY. God I wish I were there just so I could slap them back to sanity and tell them to lower their expectations, because this myth of “a classless society” in America was some EPIC hogwash.
NYC is filled with immigrants that all share the same goals of wanting to make money and rise to the top. That’s right, I said it: the top. And that must mean that there’s a bottom, as well as an in-between. Simply put, NY, just like the rest of America, has class division. We’ve got the elite upper class that accumulates wealth and dominates this capitalistic society, the middle class that produces that wealth and owns nothing but a few private belongings, and the lower class that can barely make it through the life without the constant worry of a financial burden.
There’s no way that a true New Yorker could picture his city without having an image of a minority group of millionaires dominating our marketing system. It’s just not going to happen. And I’m not going to say all, but a handful of people view the upper class in a negative light. We see the rich as either those that were born into wealth and didn’t work a single day in their life, or simply those that acquired their money through illegal practices. And I believe that it is largely the media that is responsible for shaping this perception of ours of the rich in NY.
Take Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street” for example. It’s about an ambitious young stockbroker, Bud Fox, who would do anything just to work with his idol, Gordon Gekko, a legendary Wall Street broker. Gekko was part of the upper class; he had too much money if you ask me (if there is such a thing), yet he was constantly greedy for more. He would destroy anyone and anything that stood in his way of getting what he wanted. He took advantage of the innocent, desperate, working class Bud and made him do insider trading for him. In return, Bud got a taste of the “good life” which he then gave up once he realized Gekko’s true colors.
Oliver Stone’s movie reinforces our perception of the rich who are thought of as incapable of making money the honest way through the characters of Gekko and Bud. His movie shows how corrupt the upper class can be and how far they are willing to go to get what they want. And this is why movies like “Wall Street”, along with other forms of media, are part of the reason why the upper class has a negative connotation.
