Conflicting American Dreams: A National Reckoning
There is a common saying these days: 2020 was a shitshow. 2021 started off with a bang, promising a nose-to-nose competition.
For all who made it out alive, we can proudly declare, “We lived through this!” Huzza.
Still, we teeter in limbo on a tightrope hung above plague and revolution. Depending who you ask, and on the circumstance, revolution may be replaced with insurrection.
Sides aside, the days of Americans’ silence are over and if you conform to silence — invoke nostalgic complacency, you are complicit in the perpetuation of treachery.
History is forged in fire and the United States has never left the kiln. The clay has been molded and now, it’s time to bake. A government for the people and by the people has never existed. The time has come for us to confront the credo the forefathers set down for us and finally realize it.
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Such states the Declaration of Independence of the united States of America.
True reconstruction must transcend reconciliation. This was the post-bellum failure of the nineteenth century. Fundamental racism and bigotry can only be abolished by conversation and the conversation must begin with the young, free of the deeply seated hate and social constructions imparted by prejudiced adults. Real conversation — real dialogue — celebrates difference and simultaneously encourages and accepts American miscegenation.
I used to hold with the liberal camp that sees “harmony” as the ultimate goal, but harmony washes voices out. We must speak and hear, and be heard equally.
We don’t need harmony, we need alliance. An alliance is a meeting and an admission of shared responsibilities. We need an admittance of culpability and a roadmap that pulls us up from the dredges of blame, hate, and fear of others.
This brand of healing can only be established between individuals. Let’s call it Neo-Reconstruction. Neo-Reconstruction must be secured and driven by local communities. It can only work from the bottom up. Trickle-down is a failure.
States relinquish certain elements of sovereignty in return for the promise of protection and aid from the federal government. The federal government of the past three decades has increasingly failed. The federal government of the last four years has failed to disburse meaningful aid to the people.
The federal government of the last year has actively sought to limit states’ access to medical aid and supplies, and it has actively incited division between states and citizens. It has proudly invoked a policy of militarism and “law and order” against unarmed citizen civilians of certain creeds exercising their First Amendment right to peacefully protest.
While it champions the preservation of the Second Amendment, it tear gasses and shoots down the First, the very foundation of a free, democratic society.
Is now the time to rise up without cessation until this failed government is overthrown and replaced with a new one built by the people and for the people?
One camp fears the tanks that will roll down our streets and one camp fears the tanks that do. The soldiers who swore to protect our freedoms now confront orders to abolish them — either way, people are being silenced.
We are fragmented, but are we fractured beyond repair?
It is clear that the “united” of the United States walks hand-in-hand with the American Dream. It remains to be striven for, yet to be achieved.