Dream a Little Dream

No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate one and love the other, 

or be devoted to one and despise the other.  You cannot serve God and wealth.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 6: 24

I have been thinking a lot about the American Dream (not Dusty Rhoades, well maybe a little, I will always at least picture Dusty at some point when I hear that phrase) over the past few days.  In the news there is talk of the Donald rescinding DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) which was enacted under President Obama.  The people who are protected by this act, called "Dreamers," because they are given a chance to continue to live in the United States and pursue the American Dream without fear of being deported to a country where they really have never experienced life and may not even speak the language.

This is a level up on the rhetoric of a few months ago, where Trump basically continued the Obama era emphasis on deportation of undocumented people who were guilty of criminal acts of some sort.  This is a threat to a particularly vulnerable segment of society, whom many, including many conservatives, believe should be protected and given a chance at the American Dream.  The problem is that it was done through executive action by President Obama, and as I keep reminding myself when I wake up in a cold sweat: the President is not a king.  Trump seems to be, absent any significant legislative success, taking gleeful delight in kicking over Obama's sandcastles.  Executive Orders are legally always on shaky ground, if they are unconstitutional they must be thrown out (as Trumps first attempt at travel restrictions was).  Presidents will often use some form of executive order to do things that Congress cannot or will not do.  Immigration reform was a big agenda item for the Obama administration and one they did not achieve.  DACA was a band-aid measure, to give people who were brought to this country illegally when they were children some measure of security.  It was also an over-reach of Presidential authority, albeit a compassionate one.

Ideally Congress would have enacted laws that would protect children from being booted out of the only country they have ever known and welcomed these people into the process of becoming citizens.  But Congress has been pretty broken and the spurious argument that such mercy would only encourage more lawless immigration prevented such an act from being passed.

If I give Trump more credit than I normally do, it is at least a possibility that his whole approach to DACA is actually designed to precipitate actual legislation and move DACA from the shaky ground of an executive action to an actual, properly enacted piece of legislation.  If that happens I will try, difficult though it may be, to admit that Trump did something right, but let me say that at this particular moment, trusting Congress to do the right thing seems like a long odds bet.

The fact of the matter is though, I think this about Trump appeasing his base, people who hear the word immigrant and automatically think: illegal. Trump was elected on a wave of sentiment from a group of people who feel that the system has let them down, and they are right.  Unfortunately they have actually rather misidentified the part of the system that has let them down.  It is not the immigration system that has caused their woes.  Certainly competing with people who are willing to work for sub-standard wages is not a great feeling in the job market, but let's be honest, we mostly need more agricultural workers than we have and last time I heard, it was not difficult to get a job at McDonalds or cleaning hotel rooms.  What a lot of middle America laments are manufacturing jobs of the sort that helped their grandparents achieve the American Dream, meaning a solid place in the middle class; home ownership, health insurance, car(s), and a chance to retire for a few years before you die.  Those jobs have taken a big hit for two reasons, only one of which has anything to do with foreigners.  The first reason is technology.  Mexicans have not taken these jobs, robots have, greater efficiency and automation have.  The second reason is globalization of the labor force.  People in Mexico may very well be doing the jobs that used to be done in Detroit, but they're not doing them in Detroit they're doing them in Tijuana and Juarez, on the other side of that border where Trump wants his big beautiful wall.  They're working for less than the unionized American workers who hold on to the silly idea that they ought to be paid a living wage, and by living they mean middle class (see above description).

It's oh so much easier for a politician to get people to blame the foreigners and the other than it is to get them to blame the capitalists and the scions of greed.  It's easier because we inherently think that that the people coming up from below us are more of a threat than the ones standing on our neck. We fear the dirty immigrant who works in the fields for pennies more than the stockbrokers who can rob us with pens and bring our entire economy to the verge of disaster (true story, just happened)  I don't know why that is, but it is a useful reality for people who want to hold on to power.  It is why so many otherwise good, thoughtful people resisted the civil rights movement and thought of Martin Luther King Jr. as a trouble maker.  It is why a lot of good, decent people supported Donald Trump despite his embarrassing and crude behavior.

As long as we define our American Dream primarily as an economic reality we will be vulnerable to this sort of blindness.  Bill Clinton famously said, "It's the economy stupid," in response to why people would blithely accept so many other problems.  Yesterday, on Labor Day, Michele and I took the kids into D.C. to see some of the monuments.  We visited the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam and Korean War Memorials, and the Memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  I thought a lot about the American Dream as we walked around the Mall and saw both the light and dark sides of our Empire.

Here are some: 

1. We are coming along, slowly.
2. The American Dream really has to be for all of us, if it is going to be for any of us, and by all I mean we must stubbornly include all the people of different races and creeds, even and especially when it is difficult. I heard many languages, and saw many different people from many different cultures all looking to the American story as an example for what we might be as a human race, it is beautiful and hopeful to see it that way.
   
   
   
3. The cost of the wars we fight and which we have fought is born most tragically by the sons and daughters of the poor and working class and on the families which are forever changed even as the rest of us only know them as names and shadows engraved in black marble.
   
4. If our Dream is to survive, we have to keep looking forward, while never forgetting where we come from.
   

We still have a dream.