Bad Dream

Darryl Halbrooks

 
I had a bad dream. In my dream, most other countries hated the country I lived in but the people of the country I lived in didn’t care about that. They said, Who Cares About That? Those other countries are just jealous. They said, we’re The Greatest Country On Earth. But when I was away from this country for any reason--even though I always dropped to my knees and kissed its soil every time I reentered it because it was my country--I painted a Maple Leaf on my daypack, just to be on the safe side. In my dream, the Maple Leaf was a symbol of one of the countries that had a more humble Weltanschauung.

In my dream, Detroit came out with a new, bigger Hummer whose advertising slogan was this: This Is The Hummer That Ate Your Neighbor’s Hummer.

In my dream, the Leaders of my country believed that oil and water and air would go on forever and they said Drill Baby Drill and opened up new habitats for Off Road Vehicles and closed more habitats for bears and wolves and owls and snakes and bobcats and frogs.

In my dream, my country was in a war without end and the only ones who noticed were the Brave Volunteer Soldiers and their families--because we were all busy driving our Hummers and winking and saying You Betcha.

In my dream, even smart people pronounced it Nucular--so the dictionary folks just went ahead and changed the spelling.

In my dream, the Leaders of my country looked at everything in simplistic terms of Right and Wrong, Good and Evil. We had something called a Supreme Court, whose newest members, elected for life, ensured a majority, who would, whenever the first opportunity arose, take away the rights of half the country’s population to control their own bodies, or make it illegal for two people who loved each other to marry, because they happened to prefer being with each other rather than someone of the opposite gender. In my dream, the members of this court agreed to allow a religious document, central to one particular religious persuasion, to be posted in schools and courthouses and other public places--even if the people who had to occupy these places had different religious beliefs or--God Forbid--did not believe that any invisible being in the sky controlled their lives or even existed.

In my dream, a man came, who said sensible things--fair things. He didn’t call people names and even said he would be open to Listening To The Views of Others. He didn’t think Global Warming was a lie made up by Tree-Huggers. He said that certain medical research that could make our lives longer and better, was a Good Idea--regardless of the objections of our current leader who thought it would be morally wrong to destroy some cells in a test tube but had no problem with chewing up the earth to gobble every last natural resource, ending the lives of millions of fully developed creatures of that leader’s own God in the process. I really felt that this man would make a good and wise new leader for my country but I was mistaken because it turned out that he Didn’t Wear a Flag Pin and Palled Around with Terrorists and had a Terrorist-Sounding Name and was a Redistributionary-Socialist-Baby-Killer. Also he was BLACK, something that in my dream, I guess I had failed to notice--because everything he said made So Much Sense.

It was at about this point in my dream that my wife woke me. She said that I was whimpering and moaning. It took a few seconds before I realized that it had been a Nightmare--and that it was over now--and I remembered why I was actually so damned happy.