I thought we were capable of improving humanity; I no longer can hold onto that dream

For me, the American Dream is dead… Oh, not that American Dream.

I’ve always been fairly aware that the capitalist dream narrative, particularly for those of us who aren’t nepo babies, was faulty at its core. Work hard enough, and you can be rich – and even be president. Uh.. no.

I mean another American Dream.

I was raised in American exceptionalism, and somewhere deep inside of me I believed that America, no matter how flawed, was somehow a part of bettering humanity. Not just with more money, but with more human care at its core.

I believed there was a goodness of heart here. A thirst for learning. A willingness to encounter new ideas. A sacrificial care for other human beings, even when caring cost us something.

THAT American Dream is dead.

Or maybe the Dream was simply flawed from the start. A deception caused by propagandized teaching. I learned something recently about the word apocalypse. Growing up in evangelical Christianity, apocalypse meant the end of the world: beasts and tribulation and Jesus returning while the rest of us tried desperately not to get left behind.

But apocalypse comes from a word meaning an uncovering. A disclosure. A revealing. And perhaps that’s what the experience of this crazy era has been for me. An apocalypse of what was actually happening around me.

Not the destruction of my Dream of America, but a revealing that the Dream was never based in the reality of who we are as a people.

The straw

I should probably tell you about the seemingly insignificant interaction that finally broke something in me.

Recently, I posted again about transgender participation in sports. My argument ongoing has been that the issue has become enormously useful as a political vehicle for turning a tiny and vulnerable population into something the larger population is encouraged to fear. That how authoritarians have gained power throughout history – the dehumanization of marginalized people groups.

A local acquaintance responded. This is someone who remembered me from my years as a sportscaster. Someone who would likely be called a good person by those around him.

He wrote:

“I remember you when you were a sportscaster and it’s just so bizarre that this is the hill you keep doubling and tripling down on. Let it go. There is no father that wants his daughter in a locker room with a tranny. There is no women competing in sports that wants a transgender athlete to compete against. If trans people are looking for acceptance you’re going down the wrong road.”

And something about that response stopped me. Not because someone disagreed with me. I’ve had plenty of practice with that.

It was the complete absence of curiosity.

John, you remember me. You’ve apparently watched this former sportscaster take on this subject, even though they do so at some personal cost. And your response isn’t: Why?

• Why would Paul keep talking about this?
• What have they experienced that I haven’t?
• What have they learned?
• Who have they met?
• Is there something here that I don’t understand?

Instead, the conclusion is that Paul is “doubling down” on some hill for no perceivable reason. Even more strikingly, the statement is made: “no father” wants his daughter sharing a locker room with a transgender person. Except…

I am a father.

I have a daughter. This commenter’s universal statement erased a human being who was standing right in front of him. Without any concern for doing so.

And then there was the slur.

Tr*nny.

Casual. Public. Apparently without a second thought. Knowing there are no longer any recriminations for such dehumanization and disdain for another human being. And finally, the capper:

“If trans people are looking for acceptance you’re going down the wrong road.”

Think about what that sentence assumes. A group of human beings existing openly in society has somehow been transformed into a request to be granted their right to exist in America like any other human would?

That’s when something finally broke for me. It became the final nail in the coffin of my American Dream.

What I was actually grieving

I woke up the next morning realizing that maybe what I’m grieving isn’t the America we lost.

I’m grieving the loss of an America I believed we were becoming.

I believed there was something fundamentally American about encountering someone whose life challenged what we believed and becoming curious about them.

• Maybe there’s something worth hearing.
• Maybe our certainty isn’t as certain as we thought.
• Maybe another human being matters more than winning the argument.
• Maybe freedom isn’t merely the freedom to say whatever the hell I want.
• Maybe freedom creates the possibility that I can encounter lives radically different from mine without being terrified by them.

But history should have taught me better. Human beings have repeatedly chosen the comfy safety of belonging to the mob over the discomfort of curiosity. We divide ourselves into us and them. We convince ourselves that our group is the good one. And then we become remarkably creative at justifying what happens to the people outside it. America didn’t invent that. It’s a very human recurrence throughout history.

I just thought America might transcend it. I was clearly naive and flat out wrong. John finally proved that to me beyond doubt.

Certainty protects identity

There’s something profoundly human happening here. Our human minds and emotional systems naturally love universal statements:

• No father wants…
• No woman wants…
• Everybody knows…
• Those people always…

Universal statements are comfortable because they eliminate the troublesome human being standing in front of us. Because what happens to our certainty when one father says:

Actually, I don’t believe that at all?

What happens when one female athlete says:

Actually, I want to be inclusive and affirm every human being? Or she says That’s more important than any sports medal could ever be?

A receiver of this feedback then has an awkward reality. They’ll either have to risk a less firm grip on certainty or, as the Christian New Testament calls it, harden their heart. Apparently these days, most of us choose an echo chamber that keeps us from coming to that painful place where reality can invade our simple narrative. Let down the guard with some humility? Become curious? Hell no. We choose to protect ourselves and our sectarian, societal team.

Certainty – even without foundation in full truth – protects identity. Curiosity and humility threaten our certainty.

Maybe we just never were those Dreamy people

That’s the part I’m wrestling with now. Maybe America never really was a society where disagreement didn’t require dehumanization. Maybe education never inevitably produced a love of learning. Maybe living in a “free society” never guaranteed we’d become people brave enough to encounter somebody whose experience contradicted our assumptions and ask the introspective questions of this article.

American history certainly doesn’t seem to support an uncomplicated story of moral progress.

• America built slavery into its early economic and political order, and Americans fought to abolish it.
• Today’s Anti-DEI movement is rolling back a century long battle for civil rights and our leaders accomadate self-proclaimed Nazis and White Supremacists.

• America created Jim Crow, and Americans risked their lives dismantling it.
• Today, we restore honors and statues to Confederate Leaders, not that were erected during the Civil War era, but during the Civil Rights era with the expressed purpose of affirming a racist south and scaring black people back into submission.

• America incarcerated people of Japanese ancestry during World War II, including American citizens, and decades later the American government formally acknowledged the injustice and apologized.
• Today we root on ICE as they arrest people for the crime of “looking or sounding like a foreigner” and allow our government to send them to horrible concentration camps around the world.

• America persecuted gay people, watched AIDS devastate communities amid extraordinary stigma, and eventually recognized same-sex marriages in law.
• Today we openly call people tr*nny without a thought or fear.

Oh and if you need any more evidence that America is recoiling like a hard spun rubber band, today we’re fighting to remove worker’s rights and refuse to offer health care to those in need. And our far right Christian Nationalist movement is fighting over control of women’s bodies and reproductive choices and even openly threaten a woman’s constitutional right to vote.

America is realizing that expanding the circle of people we recognize as fully belonging generally comes with a backlash when fear (or some politician or propaganda outlet) tells us the circle has become too large.

It’s been unveiled to me that this IS America.

The backswing

Perhaps my American Dream was never something America was. Maybe it was something Americans occasionally chose. People looked at something their parents considered normal and said:

No. We can do better than this.

And then another generation inherited the progress and mistook it for permanence. That’s what frightens me now. Not simply that we’re experiencing another backswing. It’s wondering whether we’ve reached the outer boundary of how far we’re willing to go. Whether our experiment in becoming something more humane has exhausted itself and thus all human rights we’ve taken for granted are now at risk.

• Maybe curiosity has simply become too expensive.
• Maybe belonging requires more exclusivity.
• Or maybe fear is just too politically useful.

But there’s something irritatingly hopeful buried inside the history I just recounted. The backswing means there once was a forward swing. Although I dare not dream that can happen again in my lifetime.

Perhaps the American Dream was never an inheritance. It was, and thus still is, a choice of a people.