American Dream

The arc of the moral universe is long,
But it bends toward justice.
-Abolitionist Theodore Parker, c. 1850's

I slept away the holiday visit to my spouse's family in Philadelphia. I managed to stay awake for Thanksgiving and the day afterward, but then I surrendered to the fierce cold I'd been battling and took to my bed. My hotel room bed, that is.

It would have been surreal in the best of health, this visit to new "in-laws" who clearly aren't anywhere close to accepting this as true. Homophobia is as potent in its silences as it in its taunts.

Spending two of the four days sleeping tipped it over into pure dream time. There was genius in the timing of the cold, as it excused me from half of the family get-togethers. I arose from my fever dreams just in time to participate in packing up and going home.

My dreams in Philadelphia were full of phantoms of two United States of America. One is a place of doublespeak and lies, a nightmare in a house of mirrors. It’s place where promises of independence, freedom and equality are made by a privileged few and meant only for the privileged few. The other is the America where the documents created in Independence Hall are mighty spells, cast out over centuries, a place where consciousness unfolds as the spell of the words take hold, eventually holding every one of us…all the people. The times I awoke amidst my clammy sheets, I always felt a wave of relief to see Obama still on the cover of the tossed newspaper on a chair.

On Friday, in a junk shop in south Philly I bought an American flag pin. I was feeling good that day, in the company of an old friend, and my spouse was giving us her version of a city tour. Philadelphia was the epicenter of the American Revolution. It was here where both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were forged and signed, and it was here that Betsy Ross sewed the first flag. Buying the little flag in a store in South Philly, run by an Italian-American who left his family's business selling fish to follow his dream of running a junk store, felt as right as it did strange and dreamlike.

For all the years that I can remember, anyone wearing an American flag was sure to be against anything that I was for. Growing up in the 1960's, the flag symbolized the sentiment of "love it or leave it". As a teenager I perceived our founding fathers as hypocrites; slaveholders who fought for their own rights, leaving women and all people of color behind. As a young feminist even the term “founding fathers” set my teeth on edge.

And yet, here in Philadelphia, I found myself buying a flag and pinning it on. Could it be this small act contributed to two days spent in fevered dreamtime?

Symbols are magical things. They stir the imagination and shift consciousness. I notice how I want to add some other symbol to my little flag, like maybe put it in the middle of a bigger peace sign, how I fear wearing it I will be perceived as a right-wing bigot or simply stupid. The American flag waved through my dreams in Philadelphia, in both shadow and light. The ghosts of those old rebels whispered to me, giving me some idea of what Betsy’s sewing meant to them, familiar colors stitched into a revolution. "Mistakes were made", I dreamt Ben Franklin saying, and we laughed together. This is something I know about. Like those founding fathers, we all have blinders on due to our own cultural contexts, and I trust that future generations will have plenty to take us to task for. Consciousness unfurls itself over time.

I’m back in San Francisco and I haven’t worn my little pin yet. But I’m getting more comfortable with it. You might even say I’m reclaiming it as my own.

Anything can happen in a lifetime.