Even though I have been spotty over the last couple of weeks, I got really inspired to go deeper into Wikipedia’s definition of the “American Dream”. I realized that I talk around it quite a bit but I have never really defined it. According to Wikipedia, the American Dream is comprised of five values: democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity and equality. Each week, I am am going to take one of the five values and analyze the origins and the state of the value. I will sum it up with an overall score card when I am done.

In 2001, a bipartisan bill was introduced called the DREAM Act. While DREAM is an acronym, it is a play into the American Dream ethos. At the heart, the DREAM act is essentially an amnesty program for undocumented aliens that were brought into the country as minors (without consent). It even spawned a self-labelled generation of ‘DREAMERs’. My point being, from our history to our culture, the American Dream is something uniquely indigenous in our beliefs from the origin this country.

Have you ever really read Martin Luther King Jr’s I have a Dream? There is no doubt that that it was racially targeted, however if we take the speech out of context of it’s deliverance, the words are still relevant today. I cut some excerpts below.

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.“

“There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.“

“And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.“

“We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only.“

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.“

Now, re-read those quotes and replace ‘white’ with vaccinated and ‘black/negro’ with unvaccinated. Or if you would rather, replace ‘white’ with liberal and ‘black/negro’ with conservative (or vice versa if it pleases your bias). I ask you, can we deny that we are living a civil rights conflict at this moment?

I realize that the comparison is not perfect. I am not saying that beliefs are equated to physical traits i.e. race. You can’t necessarily look at a person and know on what side of the argument they stand, unless maybe they are wearing/not wearing a mask. I am also not saying that this new dichotomy was something that we were born into and likely will never leave. here are aspects of choice to the conflict. We can choose compliance at the expense of ethics but isn’t that the opposite of freedom?

We don’t fear lynching, we fear being cancelled for having an opposing view. We don’t fear being barred from voting, we fear our vote doesn’t matter. We do fear our children will not be allowed into schools, we fear losing our jobs from lack of vaccine passport, we fear being barred from the lunch counter.

What I am saying is that institutions are starting to produce the same policy that put us squarely back to the 1890s, separate but equal (Plessy v. Ferguson). Isn’t ironic that the states with the most institutional segregation in the 1960s are the states that are implementing the least amount of segregation today and vice versa?

End Your Programming Routine: Why did I choose this to kick off the discussion when a good introduction should highlight what I am going to talk throughout the series? Because King’s speech is encouragement to fight for and problems within his socioethnic status from obtaining the American Dream. He directly uses the phrase American Dream, quotes the Declaration of Independence and heavily references the Emancipation Proclamation all in support of that effort. That is some of the most poignant works on freedom I can think of.

“And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.“