Nature’s tragedies don’t compare with our man-made nightmares 

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When I was a kid, I had my share of fanciful, sleepy-time dreams—the kinds of dreams that virtually every child experiences. One of my favorites was a frequently recurring adventure—I was able to launch myself from the tall brick wall at the entrance of our home, gracefully soaring to a soft landing on the other side of the street.

At some point I came to appreciate that my dream was not unique—that it was one of the undeniable staple ingredients of everyone’s childhood. The excitement and fascination of flying was so real—so rooted in the familiar surroundings of our family home and neighborhood—that it was difficult to separate the realms of dreaming and reality.

I really believed, during my waking hours, I could jump off that wall and not get hurt. And yet, as many times as I stood on that wall, ready to test my fledgling wings, my sense of self-preservation prevailed—I simply chickened out.

Now I feel lucky that my courage didn’t overwhelm my sensibility. I escaped the curse of magical thinking, but my friend Bert wasn’t so fortunate; he ended up in the emergency room with a serious concussion and a full-length plaster cast that would soon be signed by all of our classmates.

Oh, yes, I was a dreamer, but I wasn’t stupid! (Sorry, Bert.)

But not all my dreams were happy ones. As much as I wished for and concentrated on having the best ones, over and over again, the bad ones were an ever-present part of my earliest memories. There were many times that nightmares of monsters or other life-threatening scenarios jolted me back into the world of the awake.

More than once, I was eaten alive by wild animals, somehow survived multiple plane crashes and drownings, got shot and bayoneted by an enemy and, miraculously, escaped injury when a large meteor landed only a few feet from me, totally destroying my backyard swing set. Lights out was often a time of terror.

One of my worst nightmares involved the discovery of a huge gold nugget in the mineshaft below our house, only to have my hopes dashed as a cave-in blocked the only exit. That one helped create a lifelong, morbid claustrophobia—something that still haunts me today.

I wish my nightmares had ended there.

We sometimes forget how lucky we were, back when every childhood nightmare ended in a happy call to a bacon-and-eggs breakfast. Today, I find that the worst bad dreams aren’t nightmares at all—it’s the authentic, tragic, frightening realities of our world, the ones that take over each morning when slumber is gone, the ones that make people wish they could hunker-down beneath the covers and go back to sleep.

Except for the brain dead, we all suffer from the kinds of nightmares that never cease. We face an endless barrage of catastrophes. Some of them we must accept, because they were caused only by the inherent dangers of our physical world. Earthquakes hit with ferocity; tornadoes, cyclones and hurricanes clear swaths of destruction in their random paths; natural phenomena, like landslides and avalanches, leave survivors to linger in unbearable sorrow and irreplaceable loss; rivers flood, washing away structures, along with the people who built them. Tragic as nature’s frequent deadly whims, we must accept the ways in which Mother Nature ravages mankind.

Of course, those are terrible events, but, everything considered, it’s humanity that is the world’s greatest disaster: the ongoing nightmare of what people do to other people; what governments do to their citizens; the horrors that create such fear and misery that people are willing to die in their quests to find a better life; and how all sorts of greed threaten the joy of our existence.

Each morning, we’re bombarded by yet another mindless mass murder, another boatload of drowned immigrants washed up on some distant, deserted beach, another account of how genocide and wars are devastating the innocent, another religious leader accused of molesting children, more tales of corruption at the highest levels, the curse of amoral regimes, moving against their neighbors and, of course, the continuous carnage of motorcars and roads.

But today, what’s bothering me most is the ongoing nightmare of how the U.S.—once the greatest country in the world—has yielded to the gravity of power and money in pursuit of a new kind of “world leadership.” Instead of leading, America has become a rogue nation, choosing to participate in torture and incarceration without charges, failing to support the existence of a world court for bringing real perpetrators to justice, demonstrating how its laws can be flaunted by the wealthy and unfairly used against the minorities and the poor and, in general, setting a very bad example for the world. Sadly, our country has become its own worst enemy.

Now we’re being forced to the poignant, sudden understanding that, though sworn to sustain and uphold the principles of jurisprudence as our nation’s highest court, SCOTUS is an outlier from law and order. As citizens, we’re expected to “toe the line,” all while our Supreme Court justices have become a “law unto themselves.”

Now, that’s a nightmare!

Most disappointing and frighteningly dangerous, it seems that while the rest of us are subject to the law, our Supreme Court justices can’t even be held to a fairly simple code of ethics. Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch are all in agreement on one thing: they have decided that they’re above the highest principle—accountability.

From simply lying during their confirmation hearings, to being involved in extra-judiciary dealings that smack of dirt, they’ve made it clear that no one is in a position to pronounce sentences on their wrongdoings. And John Roberts, our chief justice, has made it clear that he won’t allow the Supreme Court to be investigated.

As citizens, we must be proactive in changing the flawed premise that anyone is above the law—Supreme Court justices, of all people, must be included. This was to be the “American Dream.” Let’s make sure that the nightmares end.

The author is a retired novelist, columnist and former Vietnam-era Army assistant public information officer. He resides in Riverton with his wife, Carol, and the beloved ashes of their mongrel dog.