I had a dream last night. I dreamed that Barack Obama won the election some years previously but that I had been away for a very long time, and when I was coming through customs I looked at my passport and it had expired. I had a moment of panic as the inspector looked at it, but instead he smiled, saying I needed to get it reissued but welcome home. I soon learned that their had been lots of changes, in that most cars were now electric and the sky seemed very clear. People were all smiling, holding doors open for each other and laughing. I thought to myself, “what is going on here, this is not the America I remember, these people are very strange”. I entered a coffee shop and purchased a newspaper and found a quiet corner, because there was something about the other people that were making me feel very uncomfortable. They all smiled too much, laughed too much and I began to feel like maybe they were laughing at me. As I began to read the paper more and more I noticed how different it seemed, in that the front page was all news stories reflecting “good news”, a prosperous economy, record low unemployment, the best report card on the environment since the last century, and 10,000 days since the last shot fired in any armed conflict. As I read I began to feel even more panic thinking, “what could have happened, where I am I, I must have lost my mind, I’ve been drugged and maybe I will never find that place called home. Then I began to notice that people seem to be looking at me, perhaps talking about me like I was someone to fear or be suspicious of. Then one of the employees was standing at my table smiling and said, “Hi, the people at the table over there wanted to ask you to join them” and with that put a another late in front of me, refusing my money. I looked at 3 smiling faces looking at me and I immediately felt new panic. What has happened to my country that makes me feel so threatened. This is just not the way people are supposed to act. Not knowing exactly what to do, but not wanting any more attention, I got up and walked over to the table with a feeling of dread. But as I sat down in the offered chair, I began to feel differently, because there was a genuine feeling of warmth being generated by these three and when I commented on the lack of ugly stories in the paper, they seem confused until they learned I had been gone quite some time. Then I learned there had been a lot of changes while I was away. Everyone had health care now, and public schools were so good that many private schools had closed. The electric cars I had seen were what almost everyone drove now and public transportation was used all over the country.
The death penalty had been done away with but crime had dropped so much that many states had closed their prisons and the biggest population were no longer the poor, but former politicians and corrupt judges. I also learned that the political process had changed a great deal, in that each candidate was now given by the government the same amount of money for their campaign; but if a personal attack was made against another candidate, they lost their funding. It was required that only issues could be attacked and all campaigns were limited to 6 months.
When I finally awoke this morning I felt nervous and ill at ease, and it was not until I had my coffee and opened the paper that I began to relax. There it was on the front page, a story about a murder, and one about the death of a local boy in Iraq. Ah, I thought, it is nice to feel normal again.
