I’m No Longer Mad — Just Disappointed

I’m No Longer Mad — Just Disappointed

BY LOUIE OVERSTREET

Like most of you, my emotions typically go from disappointment to anger when thinking about negative consequential matters.

When Americans elected Trump, I skipped being disappointed and went straight to mad. However, rather than allowing myself to go from mad to insane, I returned to being disappointed in America.

The promise of America is the bargain that this country makes with its citizens: which is to get an education, work hard, and believe in common values. Then, you will benefit from the promise.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit much of foregoing turned out to be true for JoAnn and me. However, it’s just as true to worry about the possibility that this may not be the case in the future in Trump’s America. Recently, I did something that I hadn’t done in decades — out of guilt and a sense of disappointment in how I feel with Trump having been in office for two years.

The last time I read the poem “Let America Be America Again,” it was the 1960s. The poem’s author, Langston Hughes, went to Central High School in Cleveland — just a few blocks from where Bob Bailey, the father of Black Image co-publisher Kimberly Bailey Tureaud, and I grew up. The neighborhood to this day is known as “down the way.” The school was torn down before I became a teenager. I heard you thinking that had to be a really long time ago.

The poem was first published in 1936. Hughes did an absolutely brilliant job in capturing the promise of America. However, in between several stanzas of the poem, he regrettably — but dutifully — notes, “America never was America to me.”

Today, sadly if Trump remains in office, America’s promise will not apply to African-Americans, women of all hues, the LGBT community, and certainly not to brown immigrants, who Trump has said will need to go somewhere else to huddle their tired masses.