Or A Lack Thereof

We need imagination today

“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“So Black people-we the first people who had thought right? We was the first ones to say ‘Where the fuck am I, and how do you get to Detroit?’”

Richard Pryor

Imagination is a valuable commodity. For my money one of our most valuable, expanding us in ways both big and small.

I have a strong imagination, and it serves me well. I use it in pretty much all aspects of my life. It’s helped me win prestigous nominations and awards, and keeps me amused in boring situtations. It expands my vision, allowing me to see possibilities, thereby helping me prepare myself for what may or may not come. It can slow me down from time to time, overloading me with to many angles, to many possibilities, but I wouldn’t trade it. It’s kept and keeps me, sane, safe, and sharp.

and it puts a little change in my pocket.

It’s also one of the cruelest of commodities, shrinking us to our basest selves and fuelling some of our most monstrous acts. Think The Final Solution-The Inquisition-Chattel Slavery-The Transatlantic Slave Trade-Japanese Internment Camps-The Red Summer-Black Wall Street-Nuclear weapons. It takes a boundless imagination to conjure up any of these depravities, along with all the other innumerable acts of violence and degradation that have been and are still being committed daily.

Or it takes a lack of one.

And by lack of one I mean the inability to see consequences and obvious conclusions. The inability to see the “next thing”. Or see them but lack the ability, the want to, to face them.

"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

James Baldwin

It takes a boundless imagination to dream of, vote for, accept, acquiesce to, or believe anything positive will come from a Donald Trump presidency. Or it takes the flip side, the deep well of cruelty it can fill.

Or it takes a lack of one.

But it doesn’t stop there. Consider the imagination, or lack thereof, it takes to believe that voting third party, or not voting, is a good thing. Think of the imagination, or lack thereof, it takes to conjure up the reasons given for voting for Trump while minimizing or outright leaving out racism. Think of the imagination, or lack thereof, it takes to believe that anyone within the Trump administration-nominated by or serving the man-would be in any way capable.

Think of the imagination, or lack thereof, it takes to believe that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is holding you back.

We’re a little over 6 months into Trump’s second presidency, and it’s every bit as bad as we knew it would be. Every day brings a new outrage, a new insult, with no end in sight. It feels unsustainable, like we’re coming towards an inescapable conclusion. I don’t know the timeline on it, but I know it's coming, and I don’t know if we’re capable of stopping it.

It’s going to require an imagination which I don’t believe we possess. I would say the same imagination that guided the “forefathers” in the creation of this nation, but that wouldn’t be enough. We need more. We need the type of imagination that gives a young pastor a dream. A dream so vibrant, so viverant(shout out to Q-Tip), that he had to tell a close friend about it, who then shouted at him to tell the world about it from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

I have a dream today.

We need imagination today.

The type of imagination that leads a young woman to not only escape from our nation’s original sin, but to then go back to lead others out of bondage.

We need imagination today.

The type of imagination that led the Black community as a whole to cast our votes for the better choice.

We need imagination today, wide eyed and honesty driven, because we can not, we will not, survive anything less.