The thief of dreams

With every new Donald Trump announcement or proclamation that draws on the worst in us, I think about my daughter.

She’s young, only twenty-four. Her life is really just beginning. She’s at the age where you make dreams about the future, think about the life you will lead, let your hopes and aspirations wander as they will. Anything is possible. All doors are open. This is a moment we cherish for our children and try our best to prepare them for. We had such moments when we were young. They only appear once, and they are glorious, full of exciting uncertainty and potential. In those moments, we can be anything, do anything. Why not?

I had that freedom to dream, that open chance at optimism, when I was young.  Now that I’m not young, I know well how precious that dreaming was.

But every morning I get up to some new haughty, unsettling declaration by Donald Trump that I know must infringe on those freshly minted dreams my daughter and others like her are making. It’s hard to keep up. A month or two ago he was threatening to unleash Armageddon. How can you dream beautiful dreams when you’re worried you might be blown up, or at the very least witness the dogs of war unleashed on North Korea with no certain outcome? Then Trump let loose the dogs of racism as well. White supremacists and neo-Nazis, and whatever else they call themselves, feel like they can come out of the woodwork. And they have, with disastrous, chaotic results. He’s empowered them to show their true colors, and there was Trump’s old supporter, David Duke, in Charlottesville to cheer them on. A woman was killed. Trump embraced this. Now it's about Jerusalem.  We're on pins and needles, worried violence will unfold. What will he do next?  Every day is built on uncertainty.

It’s hard to build dreams, those most delicate of bridges, in such an atmosphere of crude turmoil, of hatred and danger. I am so angry at Trump. I am angry at him for many reasons, but mainly I am angry at him for poisoning the emotional landscape around him, like what the damaged nuclear reactors Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima did to the earth. Things don’t grow in those sterile places.

How dare he. How dare he pollute the ability for young people to plan their futures in serenity and peace and with hope. I’m calling him out for the thief he is.