This American Dream

The interesting thing about trauma, is that even the mere mention of the term is enough to send nerves scattered across the room.

Our minds form a fortress of heart and story all constructed in the interest of self-protection.

Some pains are just too awful to confront.

Even still, those pains yet endure.

America.

The best nation in the world.

Exceptional in every way.

The home of the free and the brave.

Laws forged by the pens of men who arrived to these shores with heart…and story.

They held certain truths to be self-evident, because they knew a life where those truths were rendered absent. Where monarchy and kingdom rule left them on the outskirts of the home they were entitled. The very lands that held the blood of their ancestors became tyrannies to flee.

And so they left, and then they sought, a place where they too could belong.

But those tyrannies were unwilling to grant them such freedom.

And this new land, this home found in escape, now held the blood shed to wrestle their spirits from reign.

Some never saw the promise of freedom, they were simply willing to pay for the dream.

The inconvenient thing about trauma, is that simply removing oneself from the scene of battle, is not enough to heal the scars left or to confront the lessons unintentionally learned.

When the time came, to forge a new government, the men united by bold and bluster, caved.

We hold these truths to be self-evident… only to find those truths instantly betrayed.

Now, the “others”, those unlike them, were left on the outskirts of a home they were entitled.

Lives were lost to protect the freedoms that had been grasped.

Free peoples were made slaves. The people Native to this land, those whose bones and blood had long fed the soil, were forcibly displaced.

Death and violence infiltrated all hope of peace.

Dehumanization became normalized as the cost of freedom.

All in the service of a dream - all in the furtherance of this American dream.

Of course, these horrors are minimized in the retelling.

Because to acknowledge them would require admitting, that this American dream, casts the long shadow of an American nightmare…

For it is the story of unhealed trauma.

Many have attempted to face the dissonance - to correct the gap between the dream and the reality, lives have been lost in the advancement of this cause.

Yet for each step forward, we take many steps backwards. The struggle is tremendous, but the grief is the true burden. The grief is that which we are reluctant to face.

So much has been lost so that we could be here.

So many have been lost so that we could claim ourselves free.

But what freedom is there when we look to the dead and displaced to prove to ourselves that we are deserving of life.

What freedom is there, when our belonging is paid for by those that we’ve violently cast out.

What freedom is there when are trapped in cycles that transcend us - stories, that we never meant to author, became the legacies we are doomed to repeat; unless we chose to see them for the stories that they are.

When we point to the dream while minimizing the nightmare, we resign ourselves to more blood and bluster, to more pain masquerading as triumph.

We tell ourselves that those who carry on in the violent tradition that gave birth to this nation are a contradiction.

They are no such thing.

They are a reminder of what we have yet to face.

So now here we stand, in a moment of tremendous reckoning.

Life itself dares us to confront that our self-evident truths have long been overshadowed by the unspoken ones.

Who do we dare grant belonging?

As if in unison all voices join to respond;

Anyone but them.

United in our distrust of the other.

United in our pain.

United in the terrifying vulnerability that echoes throughout all corners of the world.

If I trust you, will you harm me?

There are no guarantees.

And so we remain:

Divided.

Ah, if it were only that simple.

We grow weary.

Because our destinies are inextricably linked.

What an obnoxious truth to confront.

We need each other.

Even the harm caused, cannot happen alone.

We have tried hope. We have tried compromise. We have tried confrontation.

Perhaps it is time, to try love.

Not the naive love that looks upon this world with cautious trepidation, not a love of self-abandonment and self-debasement, no.

That is not the love that we need.

I write of the love that sings through the best of the scriptures, the love captured by the poet and the prophet, a love of courage and conviction, a love that would look upon this world, and all of its pained people, and dare to insist:

There is space here for us all!

A love that would boldly admit that our suffering has resulted in the suffering of others.

We struggle to reconcile our complexity.

We are the bold and the brave.

We are the free and the beautiful.

We look upon this world and see pain — but what if we looked upon this pain, and saw attempts to love.

It only falls short, because we are still at work.

Our story is still being written.

This American story is for us to write.

We are imperfect people, continuing the work of imperfect people, and yet this time can be made different through us.

There are those who will seek to exacerbate difference. This is the love that they know.

There are those who would call us naive… convinced, that our love couldn’t possibly hold us all.

A lie with enough evidence to feel like a truth.

And yet, even still, there is evidence to believe in the dream.

Because what if it can?

What if our love is enough?