Streams of Consciousness: A Meditation on the White American Dream

The white American Dream is nothing more than a capitalistic, self-destructive and corrosively nihilistic pursuit. What makes this entity think that it has leeway on my timely presence on Earth? The longevity of my existing? Plans to succeed as if it dictatorially blueprinted them out for me? As if it knows what is best for me? 

Because it does not. Those who live under the Dream: your lives are your lives; my life is what I strive to live and attempt to create and define as mine. People of corporate white America, we have been ingrained with harsh conditions and implausible expectations of white American success, short-lived fulfillments and fleeting things: a fast car, the patriarchal institution of marriage, a dogmatically monogamous relationship between a heterosexual cisgendered man and heterosexual cisgendered woman? a suburban home, and two boys and two girls who are perceived to be heterosexual and cisgendered? 

This is what will make us legitimate human beings? What in our minds imposes these deleterious, antiquated ideals, that everyone on Earth must strive to meet the same mundane goals?

Time is said to be a social construct. Unfortunately, many westerners of America believe time to be rigorously linear. This hints at a myopic paradox, as life is truthfully not linear. An individual’s sense of Time is purely subjective to another individual. What would it mean to so-called move on in a life living in a perniciously racist and capitalist country that coerces the Americanized belief that the individual’s Life is linear? That, they think the individual knows their future, when the future does not exist? 

Who says that I am no longer a legitimately melanated human when I challenge the white American Dream and deem it useless? Endlessly striving to obtain satisfaction from material pursuits will dispossess the individual of a liberated will to a jocular life, a proudly naked existence and possibly a greater, nebulous meaning to grasp outside of this contrived convolution from which the white American Dream exists.

The white American Dream is much like a pestering behemoth, whose oxygen is time, a behemoth that permeates itself throughout spaces which it was not meant to exist in. Yet, the behemoth I call the white American Dream forces its bestial self into my realm. I digress, I do not know how to feel about being subject to feeling coerced to strive for these timely things. I do not know if I want to strive for these things…these…things we treat as if they are the epitome of life themselves. 

But, all along I always have been a human being, a melanated human being, who, unfortunately, rots away by the minute by his depression, a melanated human fabricating his will to live because he finds it hard to willingly want to live; a melanated human who cannot, and should not be subject to accomplishing what the Western world demands. Do not forget the forcingly imposed God-given rights imposed on one another from the will of humans, the societal expectations of one another and our intrusively imposing expectations of one another.

These ideals are again, looming and fleeting desires, things that we imposingly coerce on one another for us to yearn to accomplish, but our drive to said things, are sisyphean as we, as humans, will want to strive for more of the same things. My worth is only developed and cultivated by me and me alone, and this inner worth is augmented by the truthful ones who do not reprimand me for not pursuing these the aforementioned fleeting desires of the white American Dream. But I cannot help but dream of what could be, a dream of me to be after I find a way to pave meaning into the mundane world of temporal joys, and inevitable departures, and emotional departures are but few of the many forevers of Life.

One of many vital importances of life, living, and existence, is remembrance. Rather than destroy my body from the corrosive capitalism and ubiquitous racism that egoistically drives the collective human will on this Earth, I will say that one of life’s greatest endeavors is one’s acknowledgment of their inward success, their inner cultivation of their happiness. 

Life is the remembrance that one had lived, whether they succumbed to the nihilistic white American Dream or not. It is remembrance that they did remember to reflect on their memories, one’s distant that they might be embellishing, laughing and cherishing in different ways. It is remembrance that, they were to be remembered as those important to one another.