Fire in the South

I had a dream a few nights ago that Alabama was burning. That's where I live, Alabama. I had the dream on a cold night, full of rain and the vapor of breathing, but in my dreams I was so hot. I was melting into the earth that was ablaze. That the U.S. government wasn't just letting it happen to me, but that they encouraged it.

I swear I saw President Donald J. Trump sitting on a throne of obsidian in the middle of downtown Birmingham. That's where I live, Birmingham. That the republican faces of my peers peered down from the lofts above the blaze thinking that they were above it all. Don't they know, I think, that inhaling smoke kills you faster than the burns ever would. And my skin is so hot.

The dream moves to Moundville, a place of holiness to the Native Americans that my ancestors destroyed. And I see fire there too, lit on green grass that shouldn't burn. Bulldozers crush the earth, removing burial mounds that are as old as the trees. That are as old as the crude oil turned fuel in your engines. Great Spirits hear me cry into the open fields of flames and they can do nothing for me. It's only a dream.

I wake up. I sit in bed crying, thinking about the red clay hand prints on my soul that makes me want to get sick to get rid of the feeling. I am one person. I am one voice in an endless void of shouting and I am so afraid that no one will hear me.

I clean up the parks and the rivers and the roadway medians. I don't use straws, or bags. I reuse my plastics until they are riddled with holes and can be used absolutely no longer. I try. But there they are, the heads of the hydra- I mean heads of corporations. Blood is thicker than water, but oil is thicker than it all. What is the Earth worth to you?

I think often about the decision of the government to go ahead with construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline. I think often about the torment of the people protecting their sacred lands, about how the United States of America chose oil and profits again.

I wonder why in a nation of free people we are not free. I wonder why in a nation of many minds we only listen to a few. I wonder why we chose to torment the people we swear to protect and poison the earth we all have to share. I wonder if this will ever change.

There is a place where my dreams and reality meet, and it is reality. It is the every day. We allow pockets to be lined, we allow minds to be bent, we allow our people to be used and traded and sold and shared. We allow for the ground we walk on, the crops we consume, the air we breathe to be poisoned for what we are told is our benefit. It is not to our benefit. It is to the detriment of the people. It is to the enslavement of the masses to the machine we call Capitalism. In its truest form I don't think it's so bad. But this is a corrupted adaptation of the U.S. governing bodies.

It is to the benefit of pride that we live this way. The pride of the richest country in the world- which is Qatar, of being the happiest nation- which is Finland, of being the most self-sufficient- which is Armenia. It seems that selling American souls to the devil hasn't done much good. Except, of course, making a few people very, very rich.