A Dream Deferred?
A friend, after reading the previous post, asked me how I felt about what I’d written, about what’s going on out there. Was I angry, he asked? Angry, hmmmm, yeah, I am, at times, angry. Not the rock-throwing, take-it-to-the-streets righteous indignation anger I felt back in the 60s/70s during a previous unjust and unnecessary American war. More a frustrated, tired, disappointed anger. So much of the dream we had back then, so much of the energy to achieve that dream, is gone.
The anti-war and civil rights movements saw tens of thousands taking to the streets, dedicated, defiant, willing to face the consequences of trying to change a system they believed to be deeply flawed. Today I see a dozen people dressed in black standing outside the Federal courthouse here in Albuquerque, protesting a war as heinous, if not more so, than the war I fought against. And while the traffic streams by on Lomas Ave, those pathetically few brave, protesting souls are no more relevant to those self-absorbed drivers than shadows on the street.
A black man and a woman vie for the presidency while our government builds a fence across our countries southern border. Whatever happened to ‘Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free…’? If the Statue of Liberty could weep, her tears would form a waterfall of despair.
The infrastructure of this country is falling apart, children in the richest country on the planet go hungry, the education system is falling apart, the gap between the richest and poorest grows, the middle class is disappearing while our government tries to foist ‘democracy’ on other countries at the end of a gun. A very expensive gun. A gun we pay for, I might add. And they won’t even let us see the body bags of the children who held those guns nor the devastation those guns have wrought on other children.
The pursuit of fear alleviation has replaced the pursuit of happiness. We, the ‘common’ folk, pay the vast majority of taxes and few of us are more than one paycheck away from homelessness. And that paycheck is getting smaller by the day.
Retirement? The Golden Years? Fagetaboutit. If you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’re going to have to keep that job until you fall face down in your Cream of Wheat some morning to be replaced by some slightly younger poor fuck who will have to work until they fall face down in their breakfast cereal.
So, yeah, I guess you could say I’m angry.
Langston Hughes wrote of a dream deferred. Has the dream become the raisin or the sore or a heavy stone sinking below the surface of our waking self? Is there enough left to reach a critical mass, to explode again? I hope so, but I’m not real big on hope these days.
