Dream

Jock Gill's post (or was it Alfred E. Neuman's) Tuesday Ruminations raised many questions along the lines of my own ponderings. I cannot answer his question about why we get so few comments, although I've noticed that most blogs don't get many comments and perhaps it's just a function of lack of time and how quickly people flit from one website or post to another. I like to think that doesn't mean y'all aren't paying attention.

But I will take a stab at some of his other questions, in an attempt to get us thinking in a direction that might be fruitful and multiply. To review, he asked:

--Why is the ersatz wanna be cowboy, jet jockey, war president able to sell his fakery? ...How is it that the wanna be comes off as "authentic"?
--How long before the "reality Island" is pulled apart by the immense forces of the actual thing itself - the unalterable and inconveniently unavoidable hurricane of reality?
--What are we so afraid of that we have to self medicate our selves into an alternative reality to escape? Is it a sense of meaninglessness?

And my responses:

--He tells us what we desperately want to hear.
--It already has and we are grieving.
--Yes.

Ok, I'll elaborate.

Focus energy on your positives, not on somebody else's negatives. If you try to cross a river just by stepping off the bank you don't want, you'll drown. Yet politics these days is too much about "Not going there," rather than "Let's go here."

I think it was the scarcity of those times of the Great Depression, coupled with another fear. This is the great fear that no one is supposed to speak: that America is not all it's cracked up to be. In fact, we are just another of the run-of-the-mill countries, trying to make it. We do some things better and some things not and--just because we got the money and the resources--we think we got it made but fear we don't. So we stop seeing where we could grow: scarcity; fear of flying, so to speak; and our failure, for several generations, to take seriously the integration of newcomers into the dream.

We once taught people civics, now we ask them to know facts. So we get, not a land of citizens, but a country of factoids. Try Preparation F. We now ask people to show that they are good citizens, where once we helped them become good citizens. Maybe the change is because we have forgotten the dream. Maybe it died in the 30s, when the wealthiest nation couldn't feed and house its people. And once we failed, we have pulled the covers over anything less than that ideal.

We haven't dreamt a shared dream in too long. And the soul grows weary when it cannot dream. And those in intense fear dare not dream, for worry of a nightmare. We choose a dreamless sleep rather than risk the nightmare of our own recognition. We do not see the charlatans at the helm. And we also do not see the saviors in each of us.

Deep in a trough of spiritual exhaustion, we dream of getting back to the surface, whilst horizons dance beckoningly all above.

Posted by Elissa Bishop-Becker at October 2, 2004 10:03 PM | TrackBack