Dare to Dream [View all]

[H2O Man]

“Dare to Dream!”
-- Dr. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter


The best supervisor that I had in human services told me a story the first day I went to work with him. In the southwest, he said, there was a type of flea that could be trained. If you kept them in a closed jar for a short time, they would quickly come to recognize the lid as representing the highest they could jump. One could thereafter remove the lid, and those fleas would never attempt to jump to its level.

Your job, he said, is to show people how to remove that lid, and not be trapped in life.

I remember that Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered one of our nation’s greatest in Washington, DC. It was titled, “I Have a Dream.” It remains one of the most rational, yet passionate explanations of what this country can be. King’s speech helped define how we want to see the United States.

King’s later speeches -- including his April 4, 1967 “A Time to Break Silence” (aka “Beyond Vietnam”) and his final message, on April 3, 1968 -- elaborate on how we make this powerful dream into a reality.

Many of us still share in this Dream. Indeed, we have since spent the years of our life working towards it. At times, we’ve won; other times, we’ve lost. But we still believe in that Dream. We are believers in the Power of Ideas.

A few years back, when autographing a book for my son, Rubin wrote: “To the Son of my dear friend and brother, Pat -- Dare to Dream! Always. Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter.”

Now my son’s generation has taken a close look at the world they inhabit, the one we are leaving them with, and they have been given hope by the Bernie Sanders campaign. And this is powerful. These young adults are not dreaming their lives away. They aren't playing some meaningless game. They are serving as the conscience of this country.

It’s said that a people without dreams has no vision. The Sanders campaign sees that too many Americans are living a cruel nightmare. We are not advocating the every-man-for-himself notion of the tea party. We are not hostile and threatening. We believe in the American Dream that has been crushed in recent decades, by the corporate-political corruption that everyone agrees exists. We know that we have better options.

Dare to Dream!

H2O Man