Dare we still dream?

         

Another Martin Luther King Day is upon us.  And, with it, a new president.  One we know quite well.

Dr. King dared to dream of a day when the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners could join hands and sit at the table of brotherhood.  Free at last from the darkness of the past.

Dare we Americans as a people to still dream that dream?

What, I wonder, would Dr. King make of the leader the American people have chosen?

A leader who, in his first campaign, said that blacks were responsible for the overwhelming majority of criminal violence against white people in this country.  Who once instructed his staff:  "Don't worry about getting the Hispanic vote.  Like the blacks, they're too stupid to vote for me."  Who called the Black Lives Matter movement a hate group out to destroy our culture and history.  A president who has vowed the greatest mass deportation in U.S. history.  Who vows to send troops to our southern border, to uproot millions of families from these shores, including many children born here.  A president who has not only denied but encouraged police brutality.  A president who has proudly stated that he loves war and who now promises imperial expansion into Greenland, Panama and Canada.

The dream of peace, of brotherhood and of love certainly played no part in the electoral victory of this president.  Did racism and/or sexism play decisive roles?  We'll never know for sure.

What we do know is that most voters claimed their fear of a failing economy was their primary concern.

But, it was more than just that.  It was a growing alienation between the government and the working classes.  Donald Trump energized a previously apathetic working class by pretending to be their standard bearer.  The Democratic Party, long praising itself as the party of the worker was increasingly perceived in the eyes of the industrial workers and the rural poor as the party of liberal elitism.  The working class is increasingly eager to blame minority groups for their financial woes, to tear down the Statue of Liberty and replace her with a "Keep Out" sign.  They don't trust the existing political system,  nor do they trust science.  They refuse to accept the "inconvenient truth" of pollution-fueled climate change, even as fire and storm devastate great cities.

They cling to a new dream.  Or rather, an old one.  Make America Great Again.  The idealized age of the past.  When white men ruled, when opportunity was infinite and when the whole world was looked upon as a frontier waiting to be conquered, drilled, exploited.  Raped.  No fear of ecological collapse and no empathy for the downtrodden abroad, of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Just us.  America First.  Last and always.  The devil with everyone else.

Dreams of integration and diversity are spoken of now only in hushed whispers, it seems.  The devil with diversity.  The devil with sensitivity and understanding.  The devil with progress.  We want to go backward into the American dream of old.  The white man's dream.  Anything else scares the hell out of us.  God knows we won't put the racist brutalities of past generations in our history books.  Our kids might actually read it!

The saddest and most disheartening fact of all isn't even that more blacks and Hispanics voted for Trump this time, but that so many young people did.  The upcoming generation has accepted the message of hate and fear and hopelessness; they're looking back to the past, not ahead to the future.

So...Is the dream truly dead?

Only time with tell.  Perhaps we have to hit rock bottom before we start to rise again as a nation of hope, not despair.  Idealism, not cynicism.  A nation that embraces love, not hate.  Truth, not falsehood.

The question now is...can we survive what is to come?

Turn the page.