DREAMS

     Dreams. Hopes. Longings. Futures. America.
Once those words were all synonymous of each other. Once there were truly dreams and visions of a future and for many that dream, that vision, was all that sustained them as they struggled and made their way first to America and then to the hard and long slog to achieving goals and a future for their children. Once. Once upon a time.
     To dream in America is not a foreign concept. From George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to FDR to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Obama and to all who stand today in the fight for dreaming and hoping, where is that dream today?
     Let us begin right here with those living in poverty and despair. Oh, you say, the job market has improved. Has it really? The higher paying jobs have disappeared and are not coming back, no matter the lies one tells about that, and these jobs have been replaced on the whole with low wage service sector jobs or stagnant wage jobs wherein the miserly companies hoard their monies rather than sharing. Social safety net provisions have been torn asunder under the hate filled words and deeds of the Republican dominated Congress. Telling these people to wait for January is not acceptable. Tell a hungry four year old to be patient! Tell a parent suffering from deprivation that her kids have to wait for school till January because they do not have shoes or jackets for the cold. Where are their dreams? Locked in the vaults of Big Business, Big Pharma, and crooked pols.
     Dreams are shattered when the words and emotions emanating from the White House, the home of our ostensible leader, are acrimonious, hateful, rude and crude. Destroyed by his own deeds and mouth, he is now in a petulant fury, the fury truly of a demented one, one caught in the throes of emotions uncontrollable in the blackness of a dementia. Fire people. Sulk. Lie. Change stories. Invent tales out of nowhere with neither rhyme nor reason nor even possibility and attack, attack, attack all those who "defy" you. That is our 'leader' today. Where all the dreams? 
     Where do we, the citizens of America, turn? Who will actually help us in these dangerous times? Who will aid us in restoring the dreams to America, the dream that was and still should be America? Who? Ourselves and hard work.
     Last night I had the privilege of seeing and hearing Judy Collins. Stephen Stills was there as well but he was kind of blah. But Collins was in top form. Her voice still soared and rang with power. Her heart is still in the right place as she stepped forward and with no accompaniment, on an empty stage, to a dead silent audience, Judy Collins sang of Maria, she with the dreams and the hopes and a daughter, one who was deported, their only child ripped from within the bosom of the family. She sang of the struggles of this family. She sang of their dreams, of the dream that was America. She sang of their hope. And now, no more dreams and all that was left is hope. Hope.
     As she ended the song, there was silence, and then there were cheers and many, including myself, jumped up and roared for her, with her and with all the Marias, all the denied dreams that America has become.     
     Do we dare to dream anymore? Do we dare ourselves to reinvent America, the true country, the way it was meant to be, the country that made mistakes but that corrected them over time? Do we dare to try and overcome this country of blackened and deadened souls, where the people of color are targeted and singled out, where Jews once more have fear in their daily lives, where a company will not think that giving all employees a handgun is a wonderful present!
     Do we dare? Do we dare! Do YOU dare?