I wish Dr. King HADN’T dreamed.
(Hear me out. Please.)
A dream is fragile.
It can be manipulated.
Subjugated.
Eradicated.
A dream is vulnerable.
It can be misappropriated.
Commercialized.
Weaponized.
A dream is intangible.
It can be manipulated.
Victimized.
Criminalized.
A dream is a vision.
Something to strive for.
But impossible to obtain.
The striving requires endless effort.
Backbreaking work.
Soul-crashing sacrifice.
For what?
A dream?
I can hear so clearly the hopes
of the Ancestors who marched.
Who sat.
Water hoses.
Police dogs.
Jail.
All for a dream.
Feed people hope.
When they have no power.
Hope for something better makes us brave.
Dreams fuel the passion to march into the next generation so they can run.
Vision is seeing what’s not there as if it were.
We sometimes call that faith. The substance of things hoped, that are unseen.
Dr. King’s dream was
—a vision
—a prophesy
of what equality for all could look like.
For the audacity of that dream, he was:
beaten.
arrested.
Murdered.
I wished Dr. King hadn’t dreamed.
Or at the very least, not shared his dream with the world.
If he hadn’t, maybe his four little babies would not have been left fatherless.
Perhaps he would have been alive to facilitate unity of labor unions on both sides of the color line.
Groomed a group of leaders to teach the babies how to organized politically to impact legistration, not just visualization with marches.
Taught us the value of our spending power as well as the power of our unity.
I wonder if Dr. King had just kept his dream to himself would we even HAVE the prison industrial complex?
Or
Teen moms?
Blk Men who publicly hate Blk Women?
Crack epidemic?
I wonder.
If Dr. King had lived, just 10 years longer, I believe his dream would have been translated into strategic actions that would have altered the course of human history.
We would be living in an entirely different world, if Dr. King had lived to make his dream a reality.
I don’t begrudge the Dream.
It has inspird the world and justice and continues to do so.
I thank Dr. King for his dream and sacrifice such that I can speak, learn, live, and buy in ways Dr. King could not during his lifetime.
I honor Dr. King’s dream.
His service.
His sacrifice.
I just wished he had lived long enough to fulifill it.
That’s all.
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