Dreams Deferred

I had every intention of posting once a month on Substack, but. like a lot of other writers I’ve been hearing from lately, the horrors of America 2025 have left me nearly speechless. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, there’s this and this and this, for starters.)

I want to write about dreams, but all I can think about are dreams deferred.

February was Black History Month, which the Trump administration celebrated by issuing executive orders aimed at curtailing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and firing General C.Q. Brown, the Chairman and only Black member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (along with the only woman on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti—so “Happy Women’s History Month,” I guess). The Defense Intelligence Agency fell in line, ordering a pause of all activities and events related to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, Juneteenth, LGBTQ Pride Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and other “special observances.” A lot of organizations and companies that used to make efforts to acknowledge Black history in February seem to want to curry favor with the administration and likewise decided not to acknowledge it (looking at you, Google).

It looks like we’re going backwards—not just back before the Civil Rights Movement but further back, before that little thing called the American Revolution. Trump has “jokingly” declared himself King. An unelected billionaire who donated a quarter billion dollars to the Trump campaign is dismantling federal programs/services that employ thousands of Americans and help millions of people (and that threaten to keep his businesses in line or to make him pay his fair share in taxes).

I seem to remember learning about monarchy and the feudal system as things we didn’t like. Yet, so many people around me don’t seem to mind or aren’t paying attention or . . . want us to wreck ourselves? I’m not sure.

I worry about how all this is going to shake out. Sometimes I feel hopeless . . . powerless. I want to write and make art (two of my favorite things to do), but then I wonder if there’s a point. What is there to say that hasn’t already been said? What can I contribute that matters in the face of all . . . this? What do our dreams matter anyway?

But then I think about Langston Hughes (1902-1967). He knew a thing or two about dreams deferred—how they dry up, fester, stink, sag, or explode (read Harlem). Somehow, the racism—the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion that he faced—didn’t kill his societal or artistic dreams. He called it out, he reckoned with it, he wrote this:

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

(from Let America Be America Again)

Not “make America great again.” He was smarter than that.

If he could write in the face of the hardships that being a Black man in America in the early twentieth century involved, surely we can summon the will to keep going too. I’m starting with this little post—a few thoughts about why we will not defer our dreams, creative or collective, anymore.

On a personal level, I deferred my writing dreams for decades. I spent 30 years working on a novel before I finally got it published! So often along the way, I put my writing aside, feeling that it wasn’t important enough, that I shouldn’t take my attention away from my actual paying job or taking care of others’ needs, that nobody cares anyway, that it’s too hard to keep trying.

Listen to me. No, listen to Langston. We cannot stop trying. We cannot stop dreaming. We’ve deferred too many dreams for too long.

It is an act of POWER to write, to make art, to make music, to say, Look at this. This is what I see. This is what I think. This is what I’m going to do.

Is there a dream you’re refusing to defer any longer? Let’s go.