The Dream of Neverwas (10 lines)

The Dream of Neverwas

- You pine for a world glimpsed (in black and white) via early 1960’s sit-coms.
- A world you never actually lived in, but imaged from ‘Leave it to Beaver’ and ‘My Three Sons’. 
- A purely American Dream of a house in the suburbs with a shiny new Cadillac in the drive.
-  Mom (in pearls and high heals) dutifully having the perfect dinner (with new baked apple pie) set on that spotless dining room table for Dad when he waltzes in from his white collar job.
- The two (point five) kids, first a boy, then a girl, mischievous but always obedient, helping with the washing up before they went upstairs to their individual bedrooms, to do their daily homework before ‘bedtime 8:15’.
- While downstairs, the Man of the Household read his paper and smoked his pipe, before joining ‘the Little Lady’ in their bedroom (where they slept in separate twin beds, her in a neck high night gown, him in his pyjamas).

- You slump on your couch, faithfully glued to your wide screen TV while you paw your social media feed, blindly absorbing the TRUTH fed you by your carefully selected Right Wing ‘sources’.
- So you rage at those you are told have denied you this fantasy, those you have been told by the demigod you placed in that Big BEAUTIFUL (oh so) White House that are the REAL REASON (!) you do not live in that imagined world.
- It is the Immigrants (at least those not from Northern Europe), and those who are not (Born Again!) Christians, and (of course!) those who are not milk white, and anyone who is not a dead straight heterosexual, and anyone with more than a grade school education, and anyone poorer than you are, and …
- When all the while, the world you demand is to be yours never, never, even existed outside of those static marred images on the TV screen.

The problem always has been -
You 

 

'Leave it to Beaver' ran on American TV from 1957 to 1963.

As a context : The USA's War in Vietnam shifted from 'Advisors' to full military participation in 1964. The Cleaver Boys most certainly would have avoided the draft with a college deferment. 

Notes on Neverwas :

Ok - a few cheats here! Those sentences are most certainly overlong. And the final puts even that over the intended '10 lines'.

I have no expectation that this piece will change absolutely anyone's mind. Either you understand the underlying concept, or not. (I personally was alive then, and watching these same programs, and they most certainly did NOT reflect either my reality - or anyone I knew, growing up in Peterborough Ontario.)