I Have a Dream

The past six months or so held the blackest depression I’ve had in years. It’s a popular notion that depression means a whole lot of feeling sorry for yourself. And certainly, there can be a lot of pondering over lost friends or the ‘what am I doing with my life?’ question.  But overall, depression is a much larger grief. Within depression, I can often still be quite thankful for shelter and cats and for those few who reach out to me. What hurts is something much bigger, that I can’t control at all- the whole damn world. Depression is not always about what happened in own private Idaho. It’s an abject disappointment in the entire world, human race, history, and God.

Nature protects us with a certain amount of delusive grandeur, a certain limitation of scope that makes your own family or self more important than the rest of the damn trash heap. This lets you focus your care and deal with what’s at hand. In depression, that valve isn’t narrowed to mean only you and your feelings: the curtain is totally removed, leaving you without skin, exposed nerves. This summer I really struggled with humankind’s historical legacies of war, war, and more war. I couldn’t open a newspaper without sobbing over yet another senseless act of violence, a violence humans adore and glorify the world over. I had a fury toward evil, which I saw the seeds of in even people I once believed cared about more than their own sexual or monetary greed.

In my own survival games, I was expecting the end of the world. I was living with hopelessness. I couldn’t imagine how we had let a partially retarded reptilian warmonger into the White House. Even intelligent people like my dad seemed to buy into Bush’s bullshit, and I couldn’t imagine how the man could be any more transparent. He could hardly speak and his heartfelt convictions about God and country were puppetry. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the dude seriously worshipped the devil, but of course his true religion was worshipping himself in the mirror. Same thing? My youngest sibling could see right through him, too. “DAD!” he admonished fervently. “How can you think Bush is a real Christian?” It was obvious to him as a teenager. And though Bill Clinton was practically impeached for an innocent puff of marijuana decades before, making “I didn’t inhale” an international t-shirt industry, somehow Bush got away with inhaling barrels of cocaine and it barely made the press. It’s my own private hope that Bush will be tried as a war criminal, just as surely as the Serbian butchers. Bush should be locked up with the criminally insane. It’s clear to anyone with two or three brain cells to rub together that he loves war and dreamed of being a great military strategist. His inflated ego rivals Hitler’s, with none of the oratory prowess. Which proves the powers of darkness don’t even need a charismatic leader to operate.

Like another romantic, I had a dream. A dream where one day we might say sorry to the native people that we shot for sport and made into dog food for the kings. And no, I didn’t do it personally, but someone has to make amends and stop passing the buck. Whether or not I am personally guilty, my freedom here is because of their blood. They welcomed strangers, taught us to live in these harsh climes, and shared their food. But they didn’t make very good slaves, so someone thought we would head over to place where it all began and take men, women and children from their homes by force, bring them here under torture and captivity, and force them to build up their bank accounts, cities, and provide sex whenever they wanted. And that is how America the beautiful was born.

It had been awhile since we’d had a good bloodbath, so Bush had to make one up. He made up an elaborate threat, and went in. It’s always a stupid, futile idea to move in on people who have more money, more faith, and infinitely more brains than you do. Yes, yes, yes, there are incredibly sick systems of greed and lust and oppression ‘over there.’ But it was none of our business! Angelina Jolie has single-handedly done far more for women in the Middle East than our busybody butchering. How will oil wars bring women into emancipation? Women whose sons and husbands were slaughtered. What kind of possessed madman thinks he can defeat Iraq, bring secularism with God’s face? This is the newest civilization in history hoping to teach the oldest civilization in history a thing or two.

It all boils down to this: men love war. And that is in many ways the deep sickness inside of me. I can’t stand what we are.

In some ways, the American election meant a last straw. I’m not sure what I was thinking, but in my mind, it was the end of the line. I expected the end of the world, but woke up to a future of new possibilities and hope. God Bless America!

Much will be made over the significance of what happened today, and much should be. Once upon a time, any number of American citizens could have owned Barack Obama, had him picking cotton with which to weave their Gap jeans. (The actual weaving would be done in the Phillipines, of course, or China. We like a whole rainbow of slaves!)

In a way, Bush did it. He was voted in twice, and maybe Americans suddenly woke up to the fact that ‘war is not the answer.’ Does our world really have a biracial leader today, a unknown dude with a dream, who thinks women and queers have just as much right to safety and love as rich white men?

Of course, I fear that those who hope for peace will be assassinated, because they are ultimately more dangerous to hell’s agenda than anyone else. It happened to the best of them, including Jesus. Still, as twisted as JC’s legacy was made, his soft-spoken words have never gone away. Love one another. The hardest thing. Are we capable now?

At least we have a chance to find out.

“I am asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington…I’m asking you to believe in yours.”
President Obama

Lorette C. Luzajic

www.thegirlcanwrite.net