United States of What?

Both of my parents came from working class backgrounds and rose out of their class level. They taught my sister and I the value of hard work, community involvement but also to be critical of the status quo.

It is through those lenses that I developed into an adult, and when I discovered that the American dream was a lie, I admit it stung. But I took my existential anger and channelled it into advocating marginalized people and deconstructing the interlocking systems of oppression that keep the great White capitalist hope grinding the rest of us into oblivion.

Today however, I woke up exhausted. The news lately has been nothing but awful. The government is spying on us through organizations that are supposed to protect us, there are still wars raging in Afghanistan and Iraq (and one soon to come in Syria I fear), the Supreme Court just crippled the Voting Rights Act, and freedom of the press is slowly eroding away with the criminalization of whistle-blowers. I don't recognize my country anymore.

I am angry. I am angry that I feel like I have to be careful what I publish, that I still don't have health insurance, I am angry that anti-Semitism is on the rise, that mixed-race families in my city are getting swastikas spray pained on their property, I am angry that I could get fired if my boss found out I am queer. I am angry that I voted to re-elect Obama and he has betrayed us.
I don't feel safe here.

What is greatness (in the USA)?

I've been back from Eire for almost two weeks now and with graduate school starting I have definitely had a combined culture shock. I am going to write some more about being away later on, with parts of my journal from the trip but right now I just want to repost something from my tumblr account that I've been mulling over since returning Stateside:

So, what exactly happened to the Civil Rights Movement? After the 1960s and 70s.
I mean, yeah we have come forward quite a bit...but it seems like things have just puttered out especially in the last decade or so. One step forward and three steps backward? Maybe I have an idealized view on the 90s and what I remember of the 80s, but things seemed to have degraded a lot since then.

Here are some points: We had one of the nastiest elections in the last four years with politicians and citizens being super disrespectful to each other and even now to our first non-White president, Barack Obama. We have politicians and regular folk calling other human beings "illegal", we got schools being shut down while military spending still hasn't been curbed nor have the armed forces withdrawn from multiple occupied countries. Women still don't make as much money as men do, check the data. Folks are still being killed in this country for being queer, or brown and poor (or all three).

This is not the vision. This is not the United States.
The melting pot isn't supposed to be cultural genocide.

What happend to the vision?

How are we all equal?

How can folks say this country is great?