09 Nov Requiem for a Dream
It is 9:13 PM Central Time. I am sitting at my desk in New Orleans, Louisiana, and if I am to believe what I am seeing unfold in front of my very eyes, the world that I have known and believed in all my life is about to slip away. I have just run the numbers based upon the most recent projections on the New York Times website and it appears most likely that by the time the final tallies are counted on the West Coast and in Hawaii that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States.
Somewhere, deep down in the most rational recesses of my brain, I guess I always knew that this was a possibility but I never allowed myself to believe that it would actually happen. Now I am faced—we are all faced—with the reality that the American Dream is over. Dead and gone.
A once great country has finally shown its true colors—the ones that a lot of us have apparently been in denial of for way too long. A country that, in theory at least, was meant to stand for equality, justice, and fair play for all has now been revealed as a nation of racism, misogyny and the cruelest kind of mendacity. We all know the lines from our founding documents regarding self-evident truths and all men being created equal, etc., etc., blah blah blah. But the reality of those sentiments—that they were written by men who bought and sold human beings as chattel, didn’t allow women to vote, and advocated the extermination of this land’s native peoples to allow for the expansion of white sovereignty—is that they are the lies at the core of the American Dream. Those founding lies have finally come home to roost. The avatar of the lie is, of all people, Donald Trump. Could not the building tidal wave of American hate and intolerance and self-righteous ignorance at least come up with a marginally less pathetic standard bearer?
The great emptiness I feel at the moment of this writing seems bottomless. Where once there was hope there is now only an echo. I feel that I no longer belong here. I feel that I am out of step with the times, out of step with the place. Could I, personally, have done more to try and forestall this calamity? Absolutely yes. Would it have made any difference in the long run? Quite probably not. I preached to the choir. I wrote screed after screed and published them on a website that no one ever bothers to look at. I felt satisfied with the popular notion that Donald Trump was just a bad joke (Salena Zito of The Atlantic wrote, with exceptional insight, that ‘The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally’). I voted. If I had tried harder it would probably just hurt more. Cowardly, I know. I’m to blame just as much as anyone.
If there is anything to be gained from this unimaginable debacle it is that now we know where everyone stands. The blinders have been forcibly removed from our eyes and the magnitude of our folly can no longer be denied. This is what it is going to take to make real change in this country. The lines have been drawn like they have never been drawn before. Which side are you on? Now is the time to stand up and be counted. Or just walk away. In all honesty, I don’t know which option I will chose.
The American Dream. Rule it a suicide.
