Argumentative Essay on Obama's “Dreams from My Father”

Introduction

“Dreams from my father”, written by Barack Obama published in 1995. This book was written a year earlier before he participated in the election, and started his political career from Illinois Senate. In fact, this is a book that could hardly have written as a political asset, because identity of Obama presented in the book highlights the story of the common man and problems that society confronts every day. Lack of confidence, hardships in life, courage to achieve, ability to sustain, and desire to succeed by living for others is the concept presented in the book. Obama provided its citizens a solution to their problems, but as someone who is searching for himself.

'The dreams of my father' is instead the story of a young man who tries to find his own way and eager to take root in a community that can be considered solely his own. The feeling of belonging could not come directly from home environment, which is unusually complex. The motto story of the book begins after his parents got separated. Returning of his father to Kenya and movement of mother to Indonesia with her son created a series of pragmatic change in life of Obama. 'Dreams from My Father' divides into three sections. First section describes the origins in Kansas, Hawaii, and Indonesia; next section elaborates the life Chicago, where Obama becomes a community organizer and a politician; and the third section describes the experiences in Kenya, where he made contacts with his father's family - his aunts and uncles, half-sisters and brothers. All these segments interlink with each other and high fundamental elements that a person experience in his life. Dream from my father presented different concepts related to Civil rights, drugs, environment, government reform, values/principles, poverty, and approach to welfare.

Early Life and Identity Issues

The first part of Dreams from My Father recalls those early years of his life, in which Barack Obama has not suffered any racial discrimination, but had to deal with identity issues. Being one of the few black students in a school of the elite was already a rather peculiar situation, but in the case that the grandparents were white, everything was most unusual. In the difficult period of adolescence, Barack began his life surrounding alcohol and drugs, but avoided the self-destructive process seeing some of his friends. As he stated in his book:

“I had discovered that it didn't make any difference whether you smoked in the white classmate's sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you'd met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl…, and if the high didn't solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world's ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism” ...