I Dreamed A Dream: Saturday Political Soap Box 201

I dreamed a dream. A good number, in fact. Like most dreams, they evaporate quickly and don't stick very long.

Some, however, are hard to forget.

I don't feel particularly prophetic. Most of my dreams don't predict or resonate future events. My most frequently recurring dream is that there is a vast underground library underneath my house, accessible by a secret staircase hidden in a closet. That's not come true, but it is a fantastic place to visit. When I visit Chamblin Book Mine or a big public library, I get the closest feeling of my dreams coming true.

I often dream my parents are alive and that it is the most natural thing in the world. Waking up from those dreams is always hard, as I remember all over again that they are gone from this plane.

But other dreams, if not precisely prophetic, have resonances that ring in the future.

I often have dreams of shopping for books and comics. Once, though. I had a dream of shopping for something else.

As a kid, I loved James Bond movies and was frustrated I could only see them once. After they played in the theatres, they were gone. In the late '60s, I dreamed that I was shopping in a store and going through LP record-size James Bond movies, ones that I could pick out and play at home on some kind of record player attached to the television.

They resembled laser discs, which came and went, a perhaps superior technology that lost out to VCR tapes, which have been, in return, replaced by DVDs and now streaming.

And I dreamed about it long before it happened. All because I wanted to see James Bond movies over and over.

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Then there was the dream I had about how elephant-like aliens came to Earth and proclaimed that they were angels from God, heralds for the second coming. The Christian right, led by Jerry Falwell, believed them, and it became accepted gospel truth that you had to fall in line with these otherworldly pachyderms. They zealously helped Jerry Falwell follow some of the most extreme parts of the Christian right agenda. Non-believers were prosecuted and exterminated, as well as gays, women's libbers, and minorities - any who did not toe the elephant line.

Of course, the elephants weren't really messengers from God. They had their own agenda: to exploit the world and its resources, including human labor, for their own ends. It was all an elaborate con. 

Years later, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote a best-selling book about alien elephant invaders. So, that idea was not as far-fetched as I thought (and yeah, there's a whole history of my ideas that I am too slow to write, turning up in popular culture). 

And the idea of a group exploiting the Christian right for their own purposes? Yeah, that's as prophetic as anything I've ever dreamed. Including the almost elephant-sized pied piper of the Christian Right, Donald J Trump, leading them by the nose to wherever he wants them to go. All in exchange for  Supreme Court domination, from which perch they can persecute the LGBT community, outlaw women's reproductive rights, and establish a Christian theocracy.

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I had a dream that was burned in my mind, one I dreamed of in the early 80s, one that I had dismissed because it seemed so unlikely.

I dreamed, in a surprisingly clear fashion, that the first female President of the United States would be a Hispanic woman, one who was known by three names.

There was no one on the horizon then who fit that bill. And when Hillary Rodham Clinton ran, I thought - well, we can toss that out. And sure enough, she DECISIVELY won the popular vote and became....crap, forgot about Russian influence and the weird vagaries of the Electoral College. Anyhoo...

Now, she is on the horizon...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Some may contend the hyphen makes it one name, but if that's a problem, throw in her nickname, Sandy.  

She is constitutionally ineligible to run in 2020, as she will still be under the age requirement of 35. 

   

But on January 20, 2025, she will be 35 (her birthday is October 13th).


I am still hopeful that Elizabeth Warren (or perhaps another woman) will beat her to it in 2020.


Nevertheless, I have dreamed a dream.

I have seen the future.

And it is AOC!