IS YOUR AMERICAN DREAM 

watching downtown Oklahoma City crumble? 

Rage monster when cartoons were cut short by a pile of rubble, you grabbed a handful of grapes & flung them at the TV with a raw throat of bronchitis while screeching about the healing power of Hanna-Barbera. Then the roasted nursery sets came out. Small bodies. The net was just beginning in 1995, & TV news was cresting (mid-O. J. trial) with every network thrusting unfiltered bits of bodies into your sightline. Old enough to stay home when sick, there was no one to process with. Processing. You write the word now & can only think of one thing: the firefighter with the dead infant. You didn’t know a soul there, 870 miles away, twenty-eight years ago, but the heat still cranks your chest. You remember snapping up from your sickness, feeling woozy but willing, learning the first lesson of communal trauma: that it can come secondhand. At eleven, it was confusion & anger—walking around the living room & punching cushions. At thirty-nine, it’s mostly the same, but with analytics—reading about the misguided motives of the murderers & getting more angry. Frustration at us. Questioning why it took so long to talk openly about our instabilities. There’s a video of McVeigh at Waco, two years before the OKC bombing, selling bumper stickers with swastikas & anti-government slogans. It’s disgusting as it sounds, beyond chilling, & although his delusion is there, it’s his righteousness that rings—a disgruntled soldier, a former shill of American exceptionalism now biting the hand of the master. We mourned for OKC, but still saw the act as another aberration, something few & far between.  

Four years later, two teenagers changed all that.  

The principal harshly came over the intercom & dismissed all of you to the gym for an assembly. Everyone just assumed it was another community death—we had so many—but then nothing, just waiting. Waiting & waiting, with no one saying anything. There was never waiting—every minute of the school day was clocked, written in stone, so this, this was efficiency breaking down—no answers, teachers only scuttling around, fidgeting with their mouths & casting side-eye glances just to make sure no one left. Suddenly, an office worker rammed through the double doors & frantically scanned the crowd—knowing the ritual, she counted & nodded, rushed to your section until her daughter waved her down. They were only a few rows over, & although the words are lost to memory, you definitely remember the mother’s shaking panic & the daughter’s shaking embarrassment, & then the tiny mother ripping the purse off her daughter’s lap & taking off in a dead sprint—how that tactic was genius as the daughter had no choice but to trail after her rattled mother. That’s when everyone realized this was no longer a community death or drug bust or someone breaking into cars—an adult did something irrational in public. Whatever happened was about to change the canon. The dean came in & quietly told you in his calming cadence that you’d be dismissed to homeroom & that the school day was over. Every question tossed at every authority figure, but all you got was, Go home Go home Go home. A good friend & you were celebrating the half-day by getting high in a state park when a young ranger, no older than twenty-five, crashed through the brambles & told you that two kids slaughtered ten other kids in a school in Colorado & that you needed to go home. He nodded at your blunt & shook his head. Drink some water first. Mental health came to the forefront. Mallrat times became something else. Corruption & cause. Many fingers in many different directions. Nine Inch Nails & Marilyn Manson. Violent music & video games. Trench coats. Spiked jewelry. A month later, you & a friend were smoking outside a local coffee shop when a couple of strangers came up & asked about his “Beautiful People” shirt. Your peaceful friend answered that he dug Manson’s ballsiness & style, but wasn’t halfway finished when one of the strangers smashed a hidden stone to your friend’s temple. You two were not violent, not angry, only loved the rage that shock rock could get out of people, but this rage, their blinding attack was not at authority or ignorance, but at unprocessed trauma, exhaustion from unseen forces. 

Two years later was much different.  

The planes hit when you were in study hall. You were older & more cognizant, but still only seventeen. We turned on the tube after hearing about the first one. Everyone joked about drunk pilots & aliens & the mile-high club. Then the second plane barreled in from the left. No more jokes after that. You looked to your teacher, but she was shaking, holding her hands over her mouth & heart. Unlike Columbine, they kept you in school. Nothing but zombie people. Half-people huddled in corners crying. Dazed teachers trying their best. Most the school left by lunch. You were at your locker when someone rushing to class tripped & crashed down an entire floor—excruciating screams—whole classrooms flooding out, everyone funneling, rushing to ease any type of pain. That was it. You drove home, turned on the coverage, & ate baby carrots until the blurs of blackness began flipping against the walls of smoke. It was comical at first, & then you realized the blurs were people leaping from the 100th floor of disintegration. You took the TV into your hands & felt the canon change again.  

Since 1995, we’re not Boomers or X, Millennials or Z—we’re a generation of violent communal trauma. Age has nothing to do with Oklahoma City & Columbine & 9/11 & Virginia Tech & Sandy Hook & the Vegas concert & Charleston & Pulse & the Mosque & Synagogue shootings & Parkland & more & more & so many more. Millions of us have grown up with a receptiveness to public unsafety. Accepted fear that comes out in self-harm & bullying, but also, finally, a willing openness to admit our problems & insecurities. Therapy used to be a secret, but now people are celebrating it, & that’s oddly thanks to communal trauma. But the numbness, the casualness of entering the second decade of the 21st century & there hardly being a moment of reflection when public mass murder happens is nauseating. We dissect the murderers, but it’s always the same old story of alienation & fear & abandonment. Angry white men. Alone. Pointing fingers. The story we keep telling but doing nothing about. There are fan clubs who claim murdered children are deep-state actors. White supremacists want civil war over delusional visions of cannibalistic pedophile rings in pizza parlors. Holocaust deniers. Because it’s much easier to have that enemy, one thing to blame. But, I hope, we’re better than that. Anger is easy, & we know it’s never going to be just one thing—not guns or mental health or race or religion or drugs or fear or trauma or environmental destruction or immigration or taxes or evolving masculinity or language or revenge or privilege or ignorance or a failure of education & welfare & segregation & institutional roadblocks—it’s not one thing; it’s everything, all of it, all of us, but it’s simpler if we have that one thing to blame, any public-square effigy, something we can pick out every day, hit with sticks & say, I get this pain! I understand this confusion! Raised hackles, instant defense, when more than anything we need to mourn & learn, publicly, out loud together. 

IS YOUR AMERICAN DREAM 

out of vogue?

Author’s note:

This nonfiction monologue is the final piece of Homeslice: Monologues of Millennialhood. 

Homeslice is a regaling, a rhapsodizing on a singular swath of American Millennialhood—the ’81-’85 babies, the elders. 

Part document, part performance, part poetry, Homeslice’s call-and-response nonfiction monologues address and deconstruct the turn of the millennium’s most repressed issues—privilege and enabling, communal trauma, cognitive dissonance, evolving masculinity, artistic portraits, and fallen idols. 

About the Author:

Dayton J Shafer’s pieces have been featured in fringe festivals, barns, abandoned factories, converted laundromats, black boxes, street sides, and with Vermont Public Radio, The Susan Calza Gallery, PoemCity, and Split Lip Magazine. He’s a former writing fellow at Vermont Studio Center, grant recipient from the Montpelier Public Arts
Commission, author of Homeslice (Alternating Current Press, 2023), and his proposal for a letterpress publishing house, Bookplate Bindery, was a finalist for the 2023 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant. Get some: daytonjshafer.wordpress.com & IG @daytonjshafer.

*Feature image by Sergey Vinogradov on Unsplash