I said to a colleague today that I've got nearly no patience for resignation and cynicism about our future. I'm baffled to hear smart people sell out so quickly on hope* because of The American Dream: The Way Things Are.
To judge one dream as fantasy and buy into another as inevitable is a mistake.
There's an experience of freedom, enjoyment, and fulfillment available by creating an inspiring future together. But since the present is busy, distracting, and, for many, not all that bad, why fuss about a future we can't avoid anyway?
I think that black people have a different perspective to offer to this conversation. While all of us are conditioned to believe in the validity, feasibility, and nobility of achieving success approved by The American Dream, the collectively oppressed among us inevitably get a glimpse through the fog of that dream to the price it exacts. From our privileged perspective this dream isn't all that bad, it's just The Way Things Are.
But this dream is that bad, and enough of us are just lucky enough, so far, that we can relax into the illusion just a little bit longer.
* Hope for a future in which all people have access to clean water, healthy food, great relationships, and hope that all human societies can live peacefully, sustainably, and enjoyable within non-human ecosystems.
To judge one dream as fantasy and buy into another as inevitable is a mistake.
There's an experience of freedom, enjoyment, and fulfillment available by creating an inspiring future together. But since the present is busy, distracting, and, for many, not all that bad, why fuss about a future we can't avoid anyway?
I think that black people have a different perspective to offer to this conversation. While all of us are conditioned to believe in the validity, feasibility, and nobility of achieving success approved by The American Dream, the collectively oppressed among us inevitably get a glimpse through the fog of that dream to the price it exacts. From our privileged perspective this dream isn't all that bad, it's just The Way Things Are.
But this dream is that bad, and enough of us are just lucky enough, so far, that we can relax into the illusion just a little bit longer.
We are born with the capacity to learn how to dream, and the humans who live before us teach us how to dream the way society dreams...And through this domestication we learn how to live and how to dream...the information from the outside dream is conveyed to the inside dream...We are so well trained that we are our own domesticator.
- Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements
I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
I know where diamonds come from; it ain't about the bling.
- Lyrics from Black Stacey by Saul Williams
It's absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal or oil. (Source.)
- Mark Jacobson, Stanford professor of engineering
* Hope for a future in which all people have access to clean water, healthy food, great relationships, and hope that all human societies can live peacefully, sustainably, and enjoyable within non-human ecosystems.
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