When I was young, I often thought about my chances of success later in life. I always wondered if I would have the same opportunity to earn as much money as the richest 1 percent of Americans who own 34 percent of the total national wealth. (Mantsios 284) These were the rich and successful people I had seen in the movies or on television that made billions of dollars a year. I grew up in a middle-class family, and from the beginning, my parents did everything in their power to provide me with an opportunity to succeed. My father, from a lower-class family, dropped out after his sophomore year and started working in construction. When my mother became pregnant with me, my father decided to start his own construction company. I saw first-hand how hard he works every day to earn a living, from dawn to dusk, 6 days a week. My father is good at what he does, but unlike the richest 1 percent of Americans, his annual salary (along with that of the other 99 percent) is incomparable pocket change for them. Although my father started with nothing and was able to work his way up and out of the class he started in, I always wondered why he wasn't able to earn as much, or even half, over his lifetime as some elite Americans earn in a month. . It seemed crazy to me that the majority of wealth in America was concentrated in a group of a few elite Americans who earn hundreds of times more than the rest of the country's citizens earn. I started thinking about the following questions: Does everyone in America have an equal opportunity to succeed?...If not, then why? Are the other 99 percent not working hard enough? I wholeheartedly believe that the amount of effort an individual puts in middle of paper...... l. “Rich America, Poor America.” Newsweek 159.4 (2012): 42. Intermediate Research Plus. Internet. March 5, 2014.Greenblatt, Alan. “Upward mobility”. CQ Researcher April 29, 2005: 369-92. Internet. March 5, 2014. Mantsios, Gregory “Class in America.” Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing. Ed. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen and Bonnie Lisle. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 2013. 281-298. Print.Murray, Charles. “The New American Divide” Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing. Ed. Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen and Bonnie Lisle. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 2013. 347-354. Print.Stephens, Nicole M., Hazel Rose Markus, and L. Taylor Phillips. “Cycles of social class culture: how three bridging contexts shape each other and fuel inequalities.” Annual Review of Psychology 65.1 (2014): 611-634. Commercial source completed. Internet. March 5. 2014.