Dear Mr. President,
It has been over a year since I last wrote to you, and many things in my life and the world have occurred since that time. As I was with my first letter, I’m very aware of your precious time; you’re a very busy man. I received a typed message from your staff, on fancy White House stationary with your Auto-Pen’d signature, which I keep with much gratitude and humility. I only hope these words make it to your desk and that it’s not too much trouble for you to read a young man’s dreams. In addition to vast changes and events, my views and outlook have also been altered, which I will share here. But first, some thanks are in order.
First of all, for your tremendous efforts in bringing the withdrawal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell to fruition. This massive step in the queer rights fight, a fight I’m a part of everyday, has brought us closer to the equal rights we’ve had all along, but that haven’t been respected or put in stone. This is the true “agenda” the fear-minded people are worried about – equality, happiness, and opportunity for a group of people they don’t fully understand. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and its repeal, for us was not only a step toward individual freedom, but a step toward understanding at home as well as the battlefield. If soldiers of all creeds and character begin seeing eye to eye, perhaps the supposed enemies will be seen as what they truly are – coexisting human beings trying to get along in the world. Who knows unless we give it a try? And you’ve definitely helped that process along with your support, which I hope will continue to grow throughout your term and (hopefully!) your next term.
Along those lines, I’d also like to thank you for you determination to get our forces and interests out of Iraq and Afghanistan. In regard to the finding and killing of Osama bin Laden, I don’t agree. He may have been an enemy to many in the world, and perhaps the world is better off without him. I simply don’t agree. I believe in an America where one is tried in a court of law, where fate is decided, though I’m sure the same fate would have come for him, be it gallows, the chair, or a round of bullets. But after seven and a half years, hundreds of thousands dead or injured (civilians, soldiers, American, Iraqi, Afghani – all blood is the same…), millions of families affected – is the search and killing of one man worth the while? I don’t agree, but what’s done is done, and you are making every effort to end this bloody war for the sake of peace, which I can’t help but agree with. A shared inspiration, Martin Luther King, Jr., once eloquently said, “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”
Lastly, I’d like to thank you for the health reform. In my previous letter, I had many questions for you, as you had just signed it and I didn’t fully understand it. Now that I’ve started college and my mother gets insurance from work, I’ll be eligible through her program in November with no added cost to anyone, and I can only be grateful for that.
On to the nitty gritty. As I mentioned, I recently started school, at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon. I originally inquired about getting my G.E.D. through their program, but upon inquiry, I was asked “As far as you’re concerned, did you get your high school diploma?” I won’t trouble you with the story behind my answer, but I responded with a simple “Yes.” “We won’t look for it. Financial aid won’t look for it. Come to college!” I was elated, and in March, I started down that fresh path. In two years, I will have an Associate of Arts, focused on music theory and production.
I have vast dreams for my future. I was always taught to have big dreams and to want them with all my heart. As a child, no one ever laughed at me or told me it wasn’t possible, and I always believed it was. But as I matured, moved throughout the workforce after high school, lived on my own, I realized this world has become a place of shattered dreams. I saw headlines of layoffs, foreclosures, oppression, poverty, war… Where was the talk of dreams? Was there room for them anymore? Had people sacrificed a chance at personal fulfillment for a chance to squeak by? Even as I started school, I wondered if what I was fascinated by and had absorbed my whole life was even worth it. I don’t want the picket fence, the two-car garage, the desk job, the six-figure income… That’s not my version of the American Dream. I am led to agree with George Carlin – “It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” It’s a sad, unfortunate truth, and the dream needs to be what its namesake implies: a dream. The system must nurture dreams, it must encourage them, and it must allow them. These days, it’s just not there. I wish so badly I could have hope for my future. My boyfriend, Austin’s future. My friends’ futures. My little sister, Alyssa’s future. My parents’, Dale and Yvette’s futures. I want all of their dreams to come true, and I can’t help but feel they too will succumb to utter defeat.
This is not a letter of a youth trying to upset the ideals of his country. These are not the words of an American naysayer. I love this country, but not for what it is. I love the United States for what it once was. For what it was meant to be. And for what it could be. Over three hundred million people are here for no other reason than to live in the freest, safest, most prosperous country in the world. But they’re finding the dream isn’t here. Immigrants used to flood our shores for the opportunity at an education, a good job, and a thriving family. Now, they trickle in for the jobs no one wants, and are pushed away.
If America is ever going be the beacon for hope it once was, it cannot be hope backed by a strong economy or a strong military. It must once again have a strong people. It must encourage dreams, not stifle them with the trials of oil wars, banks becoming the robbers, and unequal rights. We have based our economy on a finite resource, oil, when an infinite resource, human creativity, has been put aside in exchange for a quick buck. This isn’t a blaming game; this is a cry. No need to point fingers, humanity does enough of that.
During your campaign, you inspired we downtrodden youth. You were the first person I ever voted for; I campaigned in my little hometown. “He’s going to change everything!” And I believed you would. You haven’t changed everything (too much for one man), but you’ve changed a lot, and you’ve shaken things up. Your story is a mirror of the American Dream as it was intended to be. I encourage you to continue your changes, to stick to your guns (figuratively, not literally), and to disregard the media and pundits: The People are behind you, Sir, no matter what the polls say, and I for one support you greatly.
When I was a kid, I had music class in school everyday. We would sit cross-legged, playing conga drums, xylophones, toy pianos, marimbas, castanets… Whatever we could get our hands on. The teacher would simply show us every instrument, play songs for us, let us make our own. That was how my interest started. Growing up, my dad would always have the radio going in the garage, in the car, everywhere. I’d ask “Who are the Beatles?” and he’d tell me about “Love Me Do” and “Let It Be”, and everything in between. I loved it all, and would bounce along in the car seat singing “We all live in a yellow submarine!” (You can imagine my excitement when you awarded Sir Paul McCartney the Gershwin award. Tell me, were you as enthralled as I was that he sang “Michelle”?)
At ten, I started taking piano lessons for $40 a month from the most brilliant woman I ever met. She had Masters and Doctorates covering her wall. Her resume included Stanford, UCLA – Berkeley, and Juilliard. She once led choirs that performed for the Pope. In the Vatican. Twice. She’d composed a symphony performed by the London Philharmonic at the New York MET, for which she was called up to conduct. Then she spent six years filling my head with Lydian modes and arpeggios. I combined all the music I’d ever listened to and loved from my dad’s garage with the scales and Bach preludes I’d learned in her beach house music room, and decided I wanted to help others make music. Now I’m 22 years old, living with my boyfriend of nearly two years, on loans and food stamps, making love, making music, making friends, and making waves. I only hope I can spread that inspiration and dream with like-minded people who are only in it to do it, not to make a buck. I don’t care about my loans, I don’t care about how much it costs me. I’m going to get good grades, graduate, and do what I love. That, to me, is what America is all about.
My favorite author, Jack Kerouac, wrote many books of his visions of hitchhiking across America in the 1940’s, visions that I still see lingering shards of everyday in my life and the people in it. The closing passage of his most famous work, On the Road, gives a marvelous image of what America is truly at its heart, and really, what this whole world is – a beautiful, vast, inspiring place where lofty dreams and ideals are free to wander and land wherever they please.
“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old.”
Not unlike any American’s heritage, my ancestors came here a hundred years before old Jack stuck his thumb out for Denver. To get away from the frigid fjords, they took a steamer from Oslo, Norway to New York City. They passed the Statue of Liberty, calling out for the tired, hungry, and poor, and upon landing, boarded a train for those Great Plains beneath the sparkler dims to make something of themselves. Each generation has worked hard, raised a family, and passed into memory with a dream or two still left on the back burner. Our family has good blood, of longevity and joy, and I intend to spend all that time and energy living not “the Dream”, but MY dream, sharing it with the people I love, hoping they’ll do the same, and perhaps fulfilling my ancestors wishes. I only ask for a little help to make it a possibility. I have a wonderful support circle of people that see eye to eye, but if there’s someone that knows what I’m talking about, who knows what it feels like to live their dreams out to fruition, you are such a person, Mr. President. I simply hope you see the same dream in all of our eyes.
Sincerely,
Zachery Quale
P.S. As a stressed student, I’m finding myself struggling to quit smoking. I’m not sure if you’ve quit or not, but given our individual circumstances, perhaps we’ll allow each other the quiet grace of indulging our thoughts for a spell on our patios.
