From the flashing lights of Times Square to the promises of stardom beaming from Broadway, the “concrete jungle where dreams are made of” makes for the backdrop of the ever present dream and the soundtrack of many nightmares. To truly live in New York is to grapple daily with the duality of aspiration and desperation — the hope of what can be, and the hurt of what was — the present pains and future promises. For most of those who voluntarily migrate to The City, it becomes a blank canvas on which they can use the brush of their uniqueness, the paint of their passions, the color palette of their expression to create their own beautiful masterpiece in the echoes of New York just as those before them have.
I, unlike most transplants, was not afforded the luxury of indulging in the dream. My experience of moving to New York reminds me of Dorothy’s journey to the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz, a city known for its splendor and and feats of grandeur, a place of lore that people only heard of in the tales of others. The catch of the Emerald City, is that it’s a city relying in totality on it’s visitors belief in an illusion. In the Emerald City, it’s beauty could only be observed through emerald-tinted glasses, a tradeoff offering visitors an opportunity to partake in the city’s allure while privileging them to be blind to the reality of the city. In my first few months here, it seems the same sentiment resonates with New York. For many, there is no reason to remove these proverbial glasses, as doing so would shatter the facade, and with it their ideas of themselves and the world around them. But for some, by upbringing or occupation, the glasses are stripped away—by will or by force. And then, there are those who never had a pair to delude themselves with in the first place.
Nowhere is this phenomena more evident than in my placement as an advocate counselor at a high school in the Bronx where I have spent my first few months in New York advocating for and counseling students as they matriculate through the tenth grade. Here, there are no emerald-tinted glasses. I am fully immersed in the lives of students and their families, many of whom are the victims of the illusion of New York, and the dreams of those who see her beauty but are blind her burdens. Be it the lack of economic opportunity and mobility, inadequate mental health resources, the fracturing of neighborhoods by natural or artificial means, the overpolicing by law enforcement and social services, or the lack of quality funded education, my students and their families don’t live in the lights of New York, but in its shadows. The students I engage with aren’t challenged with being blinded by the dream of New York, but by the reality. Caught in a purgatory of sorts between the dream of tomorrow and the dread of today resulting in a quiet erosion of hope — a generation unsure of their potential, unaware of what they deserve, and the gifts within them. Most days, it seems as if there is a hit out on hope. An attempted assassination on morals and values. An attempted assassination of good over evil. An attempted assassination on the promise and the potential of future generations. This, to me, is one of the real costs of systemic failure, and the upholding of an illusion: not just poverty or hardship, but the inability to dream and theft of hope itself.
Unfortunately, America is no stranger to the attempted assassination of hope. If we needed a recent example, we need look no further than the last presidential election at the assassination of hope in a brighter future in the campaign of Kamala Harris, and the doubling down on the emerald-tinted illusion of a once great past in the campaign of Donald Trump. If we needed to look further into our history, and we should, I would recommend we look to the 60’s for a reminder of what to do when we find hope under fire.
In the 1960’s in America, we find our metaphorical assassinations of hope take a literal form marked by the rise and brutal suppression of hope through a series of sociological traumas that disproportionately affected marginalized communities. The assassinations of key progressive figures — President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 — making martyrs of hope’s greatest missionaries and serving devastating blows to the nation’s collective spirit and the momentum of freedom movements. The 60s also served as the backdrop for the peak of the Vietnam War where the US government siphoned resources and attention away from domestic issues while sending thousands of predominantly working-class and marginalized young men to fight in a conflict many saw as unjust. This, coupled with FBI campaigns to stifle progressive movements like COINTELPRO, and systemic barriers in the way of achieving “the Dream” such as, discrimination, redlining, disenfranchisement, and state violence fractured the infrastructure of resistance movements. In this era, much like the one we’re in now, the fight for justice felt like a battle against not just systemic oppression but the very erosion of hope itself. However, if we take a closer look at this time period and the proceeding movements, we can learn more about the fight to preserve hope, or better said, access the pursuit of happiness.
The fights for humanity in the 1960s taught us enduring lessons about resilience and the power of a collective, specifically a collective that can harness the power of three skills: assessment, organization, and community. These three elements have served as a lighthouse for generations of freedom fighters, and serve as a fresh reminder in the face of renewed opposition. In times where hope was under fire, assessment meant not just identifying the enemy — sexism, poverty, war, and systemic oppression — but also confronting our own weaknesses and recalibrating our strategies for sustained resistance. Organizing served as the lifeblood of movements, transforming scattered frustration into cohesive action by aligning our resources, minds, and bodies toward shared goals, while community became the sustaining force — a refuge where hope and joy were preserved, even while attacked. When looking for examples of how hope fights back we can look at The Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program which this ethos, feeding thousands of children and affirming their worth in a society that often devalued them. Or Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative which reclaimed dignity and survival through collective land ownership, ensuring that marginalized families could grow food and live beyond the margins of an exploitative system. Or even at the plethora student protests across the nation, from sit-ins to campus demonstrations, that showed that even in moments of despair, hope could grow stronger, fueled by the conviction that justice was not a distant dream but a present necessity. Through these actions, hope was not extinguished—it multiplied. In these movements we see that it isn’t government that ignites change but the people whom it unfairly governs, whose relentless demand for freedom and equality refused to let injustice have the final word. In these times community served as a sanctuary where hope could be nurtured until it was safe to dream for better again. It became the space where resistance and joy coexisted, standing in the gap until freedom would—and will—arrive. Today, in the face of relentless assaults on hope, the call for community rings louder than ever.
In my placement, we need more people who even though they may not have seen the promised land themselves, know that there is one out there. We need more people assessing hope’s opposition, and our resources in the fight at hand. We need more people to organize a renewed vision for hope, so that our bodies and minds may follow after. Lastly, we need more community to take up the causes of our the communities in which they live, of their brothers and sisters in struggle and to stand in the gap until the freedom to dream, and the access to chase them is bestowed upon the transplant and the native equally. And much like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, the people already possess what they need to find their way “home.” Because the power to overcome, as history reminds us, has always been with the people. This is the call for community.
Written by:
Torren Calhoun
Washington Heights Community,
2024-2025
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