MY NIGHTMARE


VancouverIle12-1985

6 August 2022

    I thought it was a dream. My house was carried off in a tornado, but when I went to see the Wizard to find my way back home, I found there wasn’t anybody behind the curtain. Nobody was in charge. 

I followed a rabbit down his rabbit hole, and found myself before the Red Queen, but she didn’t say “off with his head” like I thought she would; she cried “Hang Mike Pence,” and all her minions joined in the chant. 

My time machine landed me in some other moment, where I found not complacent Eloi, but mesmerized Democrats who didn’t understand the danger they – and the world! -  were in. Instead of Morlocks, I found Republicans who had been so long underground listening to nothing but their own deranged babbling, they were sacrificing Elo, but also cannibalizing their own followers who tried to rationally discuss matters. 

Someone cried out that maybe the Revelation of St. John wasn’t about armies destroying one another, but the fire, the hail, the dried rivers, were actually God describing Climate Change. They shouted her down, chanting “fake news, fake news.” 

Jesus was calling out “Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men, but you neither go in yourselves, neither suffer them to enter.” His voice was being drowned out by the crowd, so he called more loudly. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.” And the scribes and Pharisees answered him with “Praise to Jesus!.” He tried one last time: “Then, I never knew you!”  The throng cried “Hallelujah!” while executing doctors  saving lives and supporting women’s control of their own bodies, and throwing pregnant women in jail.

***

   Thankfully, something woke me from that macabre nightmare. Everything was okay, after all. But no, it wasn’t. I hadn’t been asleep and dreaming; I had merely closed my eyes for a moment in front of the television set. My “nightmare” was just a few slightly distorted seconds of the Real Life I am part of in  the Twenty-first Century in America.

 © Sanford Wilbur 2024