Today marks the one-year anniversary when I first met Nick Carraway. We published the book renamed at the last second as “The Great Gatsby.” It was not a success; it was just another piece of fiction competing with thousands of other pieces of fiction. However, Nick was not sad; he was happy that he got the word out and someone out there will read the story.
Maybe it is because people are just starting to read less. When I walk upon the foreign street of New York, whose familiarity exists in the memories only, I see struggling black people working and poor people wandering about. None of them can afford books and things to read. I remember when very few Black people worked in the past compared to the immigrants. Things changed first with the Emergency Quota Act, National Quota Act, and the “Great Migration.” Maybe there are people who recognize how rotten things are, so they try to fix things - like how immigrants are being exploited to death every workday, so the Government tried to limit immigrants. Why else are they limiting immigrants? I bet the talk about “immigrants taking our jobs” is just an argument to get that act passed because otherwise, these issues will never gain any traction.
Every month or week, Nick goes out to the dock and stares at the distant green light at the opposing dock on the other side of the shore. Yesternight, he took me to the dock and scrutinized that flashing green light as if he was searching for a purpose in that light. He asked what my aspirations are in life, and I told him I wanted to fix America, but failed terribly. Nick said it is good to have a dream and a goal, so I will not be "as lost and without" as he is. Yet he also said that fixing the decadence of rot in America is a monumental task almost impossible for this world. “If you want to try it, it might be numerous times easier to complete that mission in a whole other world.” He is right. Capitalism, Laissez Faire, decadence, racism, sexism, and the wealth gap are too deeply rooted in American society. I would have to fix the top, the middle, the bottom, the long-standing idea, and more at the same time.
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Over the past year, I have been making food and cleaning Nick’s house like a butler while he was drowning himself in his mind-numbing work. I am getting good at both of these things, yet I am still so far away from the center of the disease plaguing the core of society. Am I getting closer or further? I have a goal, yet I seem to be getting more and more lost. I also failed to find a job that is neither mindnumbing nor fuels the scourge of society.