Imagine

A Vision for Our Collective Future

John Lennon’s “Imagine” is one of my all-time favorite songs. It is idealism personified. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” I truly want to believe this. I have faith in humanity and in our better angels. I know there are people out there who want things to improve, for society to be equal and the rich to share with the poor. We could be better than our ancestors. We have the means and the opportunity, but we are squandering it.

Some days, especially in the past 13 months, I’ve often felt like I am the only one. I know I’m not, but it’s hard to have kindness and compassion in your heart under this administration. Trump and his cronies make it difficult to keep your head above water. This has been a shock and awe onslaught since Day One. He didn’t lie about that.

So much of what America thought it stood for has been dismantled. The government is shooting people dead in the streets. They are disappearing people. The economy is in the tank. Our relationships with our allies have never been worse. Our president is a whiny man baby who will threaten a lawsuit when you puncture his thin skin. It’s been a lot to just keep your head above water. Often, I feel like I’m going to drown. I know I am not alone.

The lies that come out of Washington have always been hard to take, but now they are literally asking you to distrust your own eyes and trust their interpretation of events instead. They have not proven themselves worthy of our trust. In fact, they’ve done quite the opposite. They have not shown themselves to be on the side of the average American. They care about a small subset of our society but most of all they only care about themselves.

Kristi Noem. Pete Hegseth. Marco Rubio. Pam Bondi. Kash Patel. Stephen Miller. RFK Jr. These are names that stick in my throat. I hate every last one of them. They have not been making America great again. I do not truly understand their agenda, but I know they are completely in step with Trump. His cabinet meetings are full of sycophantic babble. They are so far up his ass that even South Park makes fun of it. (I do say that the only thing I’ll miss about Trump is the good satire he and his junk draw cabinet inspire.)

I’m tired of the ass-kissing. I’m tired of the bull shit. I’m tired of this American nightmare. However, I can not imagine that we could’ve come to a different place in history at this time, with how we’ve been up until now. We have created a system that is corrupt. We have believed in an ideal that America has said she wanted to be but never really was. Many of us held onto this delusion thinking we were the greatest nation on Earth. How cocky we have been – and some of us still are. America is not the land of the free, the home of the brave. It’s the land of the oligarch and the white man. It’s the land of privilege and entitlement where some get rich off of the rest. We have never been a true democracy. In fact, we’re actually a republic – and we’re not even much of that right now.

We are a two-party system that looks roughly the same on either side of the aisle. Special interest groups have more power than we do because they have more money and, thanks to the Supreme Court, money talks a lot more than it used to. Citizens United might have been the worst Supreme Court decision ever made. It has caused the American experiment to explode within two decades of this ruling.

Despite all this, I’d like to ‘imagine’ that America has been and can some day be something better than it currently is. “Maybe someday you’ll join us and the world could live as one.” I would love that, wouldn’t you? But living as one requires true equality – it requires people to give up some of what they have so others can also partake in our abundance of riches. We are still a wealthy country, but less people control more of the wealth than ever before. They want to keep their wealth and power and are desperate to do so.

While we feel like we have never been further away from equality we may be closer than we realize. We need the left and the right to join the middle. We have a common enemy – the ‘power class’. We need to clean house top to bottom and fix our system from the ground up. We need to dismantle old ideas and old institutions and face our own ugliness. We have to really love our neighbor and practice Christian principles not Christian Sharia Law.

We have to be good people, not religious people. We have to be tolerant of others. Our differences make us special, make us unique and make us America. We have to love our enemies as much as we do our friends. We have to be the people we know we can be but don’t always have the courage to be because it’s hard and it requires us to live at a higher vibration. We have to be better because we need to be. Things are dark right now, but they don’t have to stay that way.

What do you imagine for America – and how do you think we can get there? I know we can because I believe we can.

Maybe I am a dreamer after all, but I’d rather dream big than not at all.

Serena DaSilva is a daughter of immigrants and a mother of two adult children. She is concerned for their future. She loves them, her husband, her doggies and her people. She is a writer/memoirist who is tired of being silent. She wields her keyboard like a sword.