I have a dream.

It goes something like this: A candidate comes forward. In my dream it’s meaningless if they are man, woman, donkey or elephant. There is no need for a stage or podium, mics or teleprompters. There is no need for a moderator or live twitter feed. They are there to deliver a message. It’s not a message of hope or promise.

It’s a message of choice.

It starts something like this:

“No one person or party is ever going to please everyone. No one platform is going to embody the ideals and goals of everyone. We are too vast. Too diverse. Too impassioned. There will always be debate. There will always be dissension. There should be discussion and disagreement. But ideally there is compromise. There is give, and there is take, and by chipping away at the differences, we often find the bedrock of similarity. But….”

…and this is where it goes from dream to impossible dream…

“We are broken. No, we’re not broken. We are past the need for casts and x-rays, past the need for painkillers and bandages. We are bleeding out, on the way to mortally wounded. Don’t be fooled. This will not be a quick and painless death; a good death. No, this death will be long and lingering: a painful death during which we watch a history’s lifeblood slowly pool around us. It will be long enough to lament. Long enough to contemplate all the chances we had, all the chances we wasted. We will limp and twitch and stumble to the end. Until we are a mere footnote. A lesson for someone else.

And it will be no one’s fault but our own.

Because hear this, and hear it well:

God is not the problem, but God is not the answer either.

Hear this:

America has a race problem. No, problem is not the right word. America has institutionalized policies of racism so deep-rooted they’ve become impossible to detach from the American Dream. Much like the fortunes of the Unites States were built on the backs of slaves, the current embodiment of the American Dream requires a scapegoat. In order to ascend, you need something to lift you up. And yet instead of that something being education and infrastructure, it’s yet again the backs of the poor, the disenfranchised, and minorities.

Women’s bodies do not need to be regulated by religion or backdoor legislation. Women’s sexuality is not something to be brought to heel.

Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers are not harvesting the brains of babies for sale on the black market. If you are against the legal transfer of stem cells and fetal tissue, then you should also deny access to medical care and technologies which have come as a result of research from the same.

Abortion is not going to go away. To reduce the number of abortions you must implement more intensive sex education, easy access to and information about birth control, family planning, and yes, free and easy access to medical care. Unless you are ready to fund and fight for those things, then shut up about it.

School shootings are not going to stop. Mall shootings and church shootings and mosque shootings and movie theatre shootings are NOT going to stop. There will only be more bullets, more bodies. There are two choices and only two.

Gun control and legislation. Or….

Sit back and let it continue to happen.

You choose.

There are always going to be people who need help. People who make poor choices, people who didn’t have the choice to make in the first place. There are always going to be those who take advantage of loopholes. And loopholes come in all shapes and sizes. Is the welfare scammer worse than the corporation who avoids taxes? Shall we condemn one and reward the other for cleverness? What kind of nation refuses to help those in need, those whose choices have been thwarted from the beginning, those who are looking for a better life. Is that who we want to be?

Right now America is keeping itself alive on a steady diet of hypocrisy.

You can’t proclaim yourself a believer in life if you don’t believe in curbing deaths. You can’t believe in the sanctity of life in the first three divisions of cells and not demand that something be done to protect the lives of those who are living and breathing. Unless you are willing to protect all lives—from guns, from violence, from oppression and racism, from diseases that can be prevented–then how dare you cloak yourself in the hypocritical banner of Pro-Life and wash your hands of it all.

You can’t believe in truth if you pick and choose those truths or if you simply make them up.

You can’t believe in freedom if you are denying it to others.

You choose.”

I have a dream that person exists–I’m clinging to it with ragged nails.