~a column by Colleen O’Brien
A fellow I recently met asked me to describe myself. I told him I was a worried Pollyanna.
He said, “Isn’t that impossible?”
Being pollyannaish means that one is “pleasantly, even unrealistically optimistic.”
Which means I can’t be worried.
But I’ve always been able to walk down the middle of the road, so I am perfectly comfortable juggling optimism and pessimism.
My dream upon awakening lies below; within it are the thoughts that come when I am fully awake and no longer basking in the Alpha state of neither here nor there, AKA Pollyannaism:
I’d like to scrub America down, wash away any tendency toward racism and slavery, misogyny and repression, ageism, judgment about obesity, misandry, decrepitude, mental illness and so on; and then replant the vast swaths of clear-cut forests across the land, cover up all glory holes, rebuild and replant all shaved-off mountains and plug up all oil pipelines.
I’d want clean energy, period, and no more raping of the land, killing of the fauna, polluting of the air and water.
I’d like my country to be suddenly egalitarian in all ways – housing, education, employment, healthcare, recognition, gender preference, marriage choices, birth privacy….
I’d like it if our most important preoccupations were our own lives, our families, our education and our chosen jobs that we are passionate about.
I’d like it if our government employees from Prez on down worked at their chosen jobs with integrity in all ways, taking care of the business they’re paid by us to do as we go about our lives in our jobs.
I’d like to quit waking up with dread about losing the democracy we’ve been working on for more than 200 years.
I’d like Utopia, obviously. And what’s wrong with that?
Those working against democracy – toward autocracy, fascism, plutocracy, dictatorship, perhaps feudalism and peasantry – want Dystopia. I’d like them all to go to Texas and set up their Dystopia and live in disgruntlement forever.
We’ll take the rest of the country and live in Utopia forever.
There will be no border crossings for them. And of course, Utopians would never have an interest in crossing that particular border. We’ll visit with Canadians and get to Mexico by boat.
