Trouble in Mind

I had a dream last night that I was in trouble with the government, personified by you-know-who. It was an intimate stage set, with the characters close enough to touch and my anxiety as heart-racing as in a nightmare. I was desperately trying to figure out what to do to make everything all right, to get back in the good graces of the powers that be. 

When I woke up I could for a fleeting moment remember the fluid, ephemeral details, but they were hard to hold onto because of their lack of connection to reality, and indeed to each other. I thought I should try to write them down, but even as I was thinking that they left me. They made their mark, though, one I still feel in an uneasy way.

I am a privileged white male. My ancestors immigrated from England and Scotland. Some were in that first settlement in Jamestown. My ties to America, even before it was America, go all the way back to our beginning.

Now that I am older and better understand our history, though, I realize this was never my country, not in the possessive way people think about their motherlands. Long before me this land belonged to Native Americans, who maintained their claim to it until fairly recently, in historical terms, when we herded them onto reservations and gave them precious little in return but our scorn.

Now we want to take land from others too—Greenland, for instance. A return of the Monroe Doctrine, some call it, by which they really mean that we can have whatever we want if it is nearby and undefended, which was pretty much what the Spanish and French colonialists thought when they were raising their flags over the Americas and James Monroe said they had to stop, or at least give way to us.

At the same time that we cast a covetous gaze at the resources of other nations (we're looking at you too, Venezuela), we are shrinking economic and health support for our own people, the ones too poor to help themselves. It’s hard to be excited about being part of a nation that plunders others and doesn’t take care of its own.

I’m not ready to give up on my country, but I do feel the way I imagine a cuckolded lover must. I didn’t see this coming. Should I stay with someone I have loved (or at least valued as a partner) but whom I don’t trust as I used to, don’t respect as I used to?

Part of the answer, of course, is what are the alternatives? I love French pastries and much about the French way of life, but their joie de vie is not the same as mine. I love dynamic innovation, and there is still no place better at that than America. England is my ancestral home, but it’s cold and rainy and dark there too much of the time. It does seem to be thriving somewhat better than we as a democracy at the moment, although can I completely trust someone with such a thing for monarchs?

Honestly, it’s all a bit confusing, not least because I am totally unprepared to start thinking about things like that. In all my adult life, even through the worst of our blunders, like Bull Connor’s race wars and the Vietnam and Iraq wars, I never had a moment’s doubt that this was my home.

But I also never had a dream that I was being persecuted by my own government. Mercifully, that dream is far, far from reality. So the truth of it must be about me.