It’s what moved us forward, right?  That uniquely human ability to imagine what could be…and then, we could fly and walk on the moon and make chocolate melt in our mouths, not in our hands and build a means to our own annihilation.  Our dreams were our salvation, bridges toward a stated or tacitly implied more-Utopian future.  Yet with all of history’s genius, the Euclids and Newtons and Beethovens and Leonardos and Wozniaks, even a cursory perusal of evolutionary progress would indicate that the reclaiming of the Edenic paradise of our biblical origin is still as remote as the day of expulsion…maybe remoter.

I am a member of the “Me Too” guilty chorus when it comes to the third Thursday of November.  I love the over indulgence of the Thanksgiving feast, (I mean, I really, really love it), and assuage my underlying guilt of being a have in a world over-populated with have-nots by sharing with as many people as I am able.  I have volunteered at charitable food kitchens and I contribute regularly to Project Angel Food.  I think I am in near-constant touch with the things for which I feel grateful, not merely as a seasonal exercise, (and my list is very, very long), but to what end?  My dreams for peace and serenity and kindness and love for each other and our tiny spec of cosmic dust are my pre-dawn calisthenics, the benefits of which dissipate rapidly with the daily reveal of horror upon horror of equal and opposite reports of waking reality.  It is of no minor concern that the stealers of dreams have openly assumed positions once thought to offer hope and promise for our presents and our futures and taken stands to undermine both.  Yet, I dare to hope that my observation is merely too limited and that the ability to envision a brighter and better way forward has not been extinguished, and, somewhere, the trickle-down genes of Mozart or Tesla or Gandhi are emerging from hibernation to reclaim their survival as the fittest.