Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

I Have a Dream, Part I: Not a Dream, a Nightmare

Alas, unlike Martin Luther King, my prophetic dreams of the future all tend to be nightmares. We live in a 'me first ' world and I can no longer envision a change in human nature in the near future. From the ecology of the world to the financial disasters of our nations all the way down to the family dynamic, I foresee nothing but chaos and disaster.

A pristine environment once as easy to find as a drive to the suburbs is now a rare location and most of us common folk will never see one. Our skies are turning brown with air that is unbreathable, our oceans so full of chemicals that we are warned not to eat fish caught close to our shoreline. The people pay more for a bottle of water that they do for gas because the taste of our local tap water can be compared to swill. Our food is full of additives and no one knows what the long-term effect will be to our bodies; however the short term is that everything is bland and tasteless. Our meat has more steroids in it than a professional baseball player and our fruits and vegetables are so genetically altered they can't be identified in a blindfold taste test.

From goods manufactured in third world countries to jobs lost to machines and computers the workforce in our country is shrinking daily. With no money to buy their goods companies are bleeding red ink and are closing plants and laying off more employees. All this makes for a shrinking tax base and the states and local cities are scrambling for new revenue and ways to cut expenses. We have cut social services, street works, and even fire and police protection, leaving us with a lowered quality of life in the cities. Our water and sewer lines go unrepaired until they rupture, our highway infrastructure is now on its own with only a hope and a prayer it doesn't collapse into a heap of rubble.

To see the difference in the modern family from when we were raised one simply needs to drive by any school as it starts in the morning. They all cause major traffic jams as the kids are delivered by parents in their cars. When I was young, it was a huge embarrassment to be driven to school and if for some reason it was needed you made your mom park down the street so no one would see. When I was young, when school got out you came home, now you see children left in day care and picked up late in the evening after the parents get off work. To have a stay at home mom is now a luxury most families can't afford and yet it leaves our children to fend for themselves or at the mercy of people who tend them for a living instead of love.

The optimist in me says that surely, there are answers to our ever-growing problems but the pessimist in me says no way we've gone too far over the precipice to keep from falling into the pit of disaster. I need someone to prove my pessimistic side wrong, to show us all how to change and to make this world a better place. MLK was not allowed to live long enough to see his dream begin to come true, but for me, I can only hope that my nightmares are proved wrong before I go.

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