A version of the American Dream

Freer than me

My father lives in a trailer park in suburban Philadelphia. He depends on his modest social security check each month. He is not in a place to help me buy a home, as I watch my friends’ parents support them in so doing. Sometimes I send him small sums when times are particularly hard. Sometimes he shares a little extra with me. He is seventy-three years old and is looking into finding another job but is having a hard time given his age and lack of a four-year college degree. My mother, who has a long rap sheet with numerous criminal convictions for drug use, is perennially jobless. She sends me money orders and checks for $25 and $50 whenever she can. Sometimes they bounce.

I did what I was told and got the best education I could manage. Now, I owe over $200,000 in student loans. I have both private and government-backed loans. The three entities (Discover, Citibank and the US Dept of Education) that hold my loan debts do not talk to each other to devise a coherent repayment plan for me as a young borrower. At one point, nearly 30% of my monthly income was going towards loan debt repayment. I very seriously and regularly consider leaving the country in order to avoid this crushing burden. (Does my country not owe me a quality education through post-secondary? Free K-12 is a given, but K-16 or K-20 is unrealistic/communism? It was fine for GIs after WWII, but no more?) I laugh when people ask me why I haven’t started a family nor built up bigger savings to put towards homeownership. It’s a ridiculous notion in this context.

I feel enslaved by this economic system. It feels rigged. And I am allegedly one of the lucky ones, having gone to top colleges while swallowing the well-worn (neo)liberal half-truth that education will emancipate me and my family. Ask the former students of Corinthian Colleges how much more liberated they feel right now.

So when political leaders like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders echo this sentiment, this very accurate interpretation of a reality that I (and others) face daily, then why yes, as a matter of fact, I do Feel the Bern. So excuse me if I have a very hard time being told that I am “unrealistic” or “too idealistic” for supporting candidates who seek fundamental, rather than incremental, transformation of this reality. I can only come to the conclusion that these friends, colleagues and digital acquaintances live very different lives.

I can only guess that these people are simply freer than me. Freer to enjoy the sort of incremental “progress” that, if allowed to persist, would continue to endanger the future wellbeing of me and my family.

They do not experience nor do they seem to fully empathize with the lived realities of the many Americans yearning for the political revolution that Senator Sanders invokes. Yet they feel very free to respond rather fiercely when we challenge the edifice of their own success. The system that locks away over two million mostly black and brown bodies and tells these moderates that they are competing on a truly level playing field and that everything they have achieved in our Ownership Society is a product of their own rugged industriousness and soaring intellect, rather than, even in part, a questionable inheritance at familial, institutional and systemic levels.

My friends, the Dreamers

We live in a fundamentally center-right country. As a progressive, it takes a while to truly reconcile that challenging reality. The socio-political and socio-economic infrastructure that holds our country up is built upon millions of indigenous and African bones (to name a few). The clearest example: slavery never truly being outlawed, only evolved in the context of the Thirteenth Amendment, which sets the basis for slavery as we know it today within our prison-industrial complex:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

In this election cycle, I have been most alarmed by my white moderate friends. I have come to truly see how much of an enabling force they are for us to remain a center-right country. They nod their heads when Hillary says, “We are not Denmark. We are the United States,” as if there is some mark of pride in providing less for your people so that they might be more “free” to wallow in inequity. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who eventually came to realize the power of the white moderate bloc in American politics, expressed this fear in his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963:

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I expect the crazies. The ones with ill will who offer outright rejection of human rights for others. But, like King, what burns my grits even more are those who know better but slow progress through paternalistic incrementalism and tokenism-as-progressivism without even realizing that they are doing the work of upholding racist and classist institutions alongside those conservatives that they haughtily claim to oppose.

Ta-Nehisi Coates updates King by calling a broader swath of these folks “Dreamers.” [Note: Important to clarify that these Dreamers are wholly different from young people who would be covered by the DREAM Act.] Those who believe in the unblemished persistence of the American Dream and its imagined availability to all people, regardless of oppressive structures in their way. Coates counsels his son accordingly:

“Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. . . . But do not struggle for the Dreamers. . . . Do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle for themselves.”

The ultimate irony is that the linkage between white moderates on both sides of the aisle is, as King alludes, quite possibly the greatest and most frustrating obstruction to the progress of oppressed peoples. Put differently, so-called progressives who fail into invest in truly progressive solutions that more fully enshrine basic human rights as “unrealistic” and “impractical” are one of the main causes of those enlightened policies — actively being practiced in our peer nations — not being real and practiced here. Their inability to imagine and work towards a world where their privilege to even be a moderate can be maintained while others have their basic rights met is the obstacle.

In what twisted world do we live, in which so-called progressives can ask for less for the most vulnerable in their nation and still style themselves as noble while doing so under the guise of pragmatism?

White Moderates →Dreamers →#HillHuggers

I got called a BernieBro the other day by one of these white moderates. It is one of the many sad straw men erected during this wild and wacky election cycle to distract us from the fact that we now live in a deeply unequal plutocracy. It is no mistake that the label invokes the name of the one candidate who openly wages battle against this system. The term has been thoroughly debunked by writers much more talented than me. The heartening note here is that this candidate has pushed us to discuss real bread and butter issues during this cycle. I am genuinely excited that we are actually talking about living wages, free public college, a massive jobs program, redistribution of outsized Wall St profits towards social programs, truly universal healthcare through single-payer, etc. Real quality of life proposals grounded in democratic socialism, a form of government we have actual evidence works abroad in a diverse swath of countries, including our own when practiced (See: Public education, the interstate highway system, Social Security, etc.).

That said, I propose an alternative moniker, if we’re playing this game, which we are. #HillHuggers are moderates and Dreamers, on both sides, who strive to (knowingly or unknowingly) maintain the fully objectionable status quo in our country. The term happens to offer a convenient linguistic connection to Hillary Clinton (and Capitol Hill), which I do not deny, but it is meant to refer to this notion of America as a “shining city upon a hill.” Originated by the indigenous land-grabbing, Pequot and African-enslaving Puritan leader John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, this concept of a “city upon a hill” was later echoed by none other than Ronald Reagan in his farewell address in 1988. Winthrop, despite fleeing England in search of religious freedom, hypocritically used religious doctrine to justify enslavement of Africans and the Pequot tribe. Reagan called this same Winthrop “an early freedom man.” He lied to the American people on his way out the door.

So long as all is well in the Capital

The connection between Hillary, Capitol Hill and the rhetorical “Hill” is that they all serve to maintain the status quo through their maintenance of the systems that support it, even with slight nods toward incrementalism to satisfy the restive villagers. They are the establishment. Attempt to move our progress as a nation beyond the establishment’s arbitrarily defined notions of what is “realistic” and “practical” and you’ll be met with accusations of offering broken promises, lying, selling snake oil, and being hermetically sealed off from reality.

Since when did progressives shy from fights in which they demand that citizens’ basic civil and human rights be met?

When Bernie opposes the death penalty, that includes the right of (sometimes innocent) mostly poor black and brown citizens to avoid cruel and unusual punishment in the form of state-sanctioned murder. When Bernie calls for single-payer healthcare, that includes the right of all people to be cared for when they are sick, including young women forced into human trafficking to be able to access healthcare across state lines when they seek protection from their abusers (remind me, who is the more feminist candidate?), and for employees to not be gouged by their employers because they control their access to health coverage. When Bernie calls for a $15/hour minimum wage, this includes the right to a livable income for all Americans. When Bernie calls for free public college for all, this expands the right to an education into a more realistic realm of the type of education (post-secondary) that our economy now demands.

From a strategic standpoint alone, progressives should be asking for the full realization of basic human and civil rights. They might not always expect to achieve it all at once given typical conservative intransigence, but asking for less than the moral equivalent of what humans are entitled to at the most basic level, is akin to tooting the conservatives’ horn for them. That’s what they do. They ask for the preservation of the status quo, in which people do not, at even a minimum, have their basic needs met while others live lavishly and call it justice. Asking for less cedes the framing and plays the game on their terms when we know that their rules of engagement cannot ever lead us to the victories that we seek for our people (See: Obama + the public option).

This metaphorical Hill that the #HillHuggers squeeze onto so tightly, is full of the hopes, aspirations, and bodies of the dispossessed in this country. It contains the unreckoned history of conquest, bloodshed and enslavement that allowed the city at its summit to be built in the first place. Such a whited sepulchre of a country needs that hill and it needs it dearly.

The Banal General

After Hillary’s narrow victory in Nevada, the #Hillhuggers are ever so sure of their alleged momentum, forgetting her 2008 victories in NH and NV all too conveniently. As hopeful as I am about Senator Sanders’ prospects, I am not blind to probability nor the strength of the establishment to shape outcomes to its will. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just money and good planning.

And the oligarchs rejoice…

The notion of a Hillary vs. Donald general election haunts and saddens me. Two individuals, both the quintessence of their own unique establishments. A man of incredible inherited wealth representing our nation’s tone deaf economic “elite” whose campaign plays on demagogic tactics and xenophobic fears to further enshrine the dreams of the Dreamers. A woman with formidable political acumen representing our nation’s unimaginative political establishment who — though her very election would be a laudable milestone — remains deeply enriched by Wall Street, incredibly hawkish in her foreign policy and is running on “No we can’t” incrementalism that does not seek to fundamentally change the system that has rewarded her family so fully. Two candidates who have proven that they will do whatever it takes to win, in full embrace of our flawed electoral infrastructure, in pursuit of nudging us ever so slightly left or right. It would be a blistering and banal general election between two establishment titans; the conclusion of which will mean very little for ordinary people except a continuation of current trends. Open warfare between one economic dynasty against one political dynasty: full of sound and fury, ultimately, signifying nothing.

I expect the Trump faction (though living with them in the same country leaves me feeling threatened every time I step out of the house). But like King, what worries me the most are the moderates unwittingly providing them cover. The #Hillhuggers who yell down to me from that city upon the hill and tell me that my family’s Sisyphean climb up to that morally bankrupt metropolis is righteous and just as it sits upon the bones of my ancestors. The Dreamers who tell me to wait just a little longer on enjoying a standard of living that their families have come to expect as the floor for generations.

We share different dreams. Though I hope one day they can be one.