The American Dream

When the other side pushes back you know that you have hit a nerve.  The airways are currently full of rich black men blaming the individual and contending that there is no racism in America.  Yes, you the actors, and rappers, and a few lawyers and politicians made it.  But, did you take anyone else up with you?  This new voice now says, if you didn't have the opportunity, it's your fault for not going out to get it.  The blame is back on the family and the individual. Where are their parents, where is his drive to succeed?  The American slogan of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps just doesn't apply when you are raised in the projects surrounded by poverty which walks hand in hand with violence and drugs.  We emulate what we see and what we know.  If this is all we see and know, this becomes our reality.  The only way a poor child can reach for opportunity or dig down deep to succeed is if she knows there's something different out there.  

As a middle class white teen, I knew because I was told over and over again that I would go to college.  I had that voice in my head.  I had no idea why or what would be accomplished in doing so but I knew that it was going to happen.  Fast forward 20 years and I became that voice in my students' heads.  One thing that we now know as educators is that first generation college graduates only need one adult that becomes that voice, one adult that intervenes in a student's current reality and says, you can do this.  You can go to college, you can have a career, you can move out of poverty.  

Social media has succeeded in showing poor children and adults what the rest of society has but not how to get there themselves.  It is up to us to now create that.  Defunding/abolishing police and prisons will leave a giant gap.  In my view, we cannot jump from a militarized police department to nothing.  As we have said many times in the coronavirus pandemic, "Hope is not a plan."  So let's make a plan.  Let's plan for a social structure that will take the place of police.  Let's look at protection in terms of guardians instead of warriors.  Let's look at domestic disputes being handled by counselors.  Let's look at slashing the public safety budget and starting with its unions.  Let's look at gun control, seriously look at gun control.  

This is no longer a travesty.  It is an opportunity.  This is a once in a million chance of remaking American society into being the dream that we have all wished for.  Langston Hughes said it better than I can.  

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme

That any man be crushed by one above

(America never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real and life is free

Equality is in the air we breathe.