The Wild Reed: Yes, Just Imagine . . .

Matthew Albracht is a writer who deftly explores the intersections of personal growth, collective healing, and systemic change. Recently he shared a piece on his substack that begins by acknowledging that “What’s happening in our nation today feels quite like a dream.” . . . A bad dream that’s actually “all too real” as we watch “democratic institutions and norms crumble before [our] eyes, and critical government agencies . . . severely gutted and even eliminated.”

Yet as Albracht reminds us, it didn’t have to be this way.

Indeed, we could instead be “witnessing a radical strengthening of democracy and society, prioritizing healing instead of harming – beyond what we had ever dared to imagine, or maybe even knew was possible.”

We could, in other words, have a progressive Democratic administration led by President Marianne Williamson, rather than an increasingly fascist Republican regime led by Donald Trump.

Following is an excerpt from Albract’s piece, “What if Marianne Had Won.”

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Imagine . . .

A presidency that provides moral clarity in ways we haven’t seen before. Untethered to calcified norms and big-moneyed influence, it looks right into the heart and soul of the human experience.

It is tackling root causes, not just symptoms. Instead of gutting health and science agencies while paying lip service to “making America healthy again,” we are implementing a Universal Coverage healthcare system focused on preventing chronic illness rather than just treating symptoms. Working to empower real, deep and lasting health on every front possible.

. . . Imagine a president working to fortify democratic stability rather than tear it down. Someone pushing for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, among other critical measures, to secure a thriving democratic society. Someone willing to finally rein in our increasingly concentrated cohort of corporate/mega wealthy overlords, instead of empowering them further.

Someone who stood firmly against the neoliberal tide – the whole corrosive system of deregulation, privatization, corporate capture, corporate lobbyists acting as policy-makers, and the quarterly-profit-obsessed market straightjacket that treats money as supreme over human values – that has hollowed out democracy's promises over the decades. And someone who resisted the newer authoritarian impulse to silence dissent and punish free expression, which threatens to shatter what remains.

Rather than economic chaos driven by reckless executive orders and wildly erratic tariffs, we see strategic investments in policies that lift everyone up – securing funding for the foundations of a flourishing economy and culture: universal childcare, debt-free higher education, and renewable energy jobs that sustain both our people and our planet.

This didn’t have to be an imagination, it could have been reality. This administration could have been led by a President Marianne Williamson. That was actually her Democratic Presidential campaign platform, her vision, what she believed in with every fiber of her being and would have worked for.

What inspired me to write this whole piece was that I had an actual (and much sweeter) dream recently. In it, Marianne pulled through as the Dem candidate after Biden had come to his senses and withdrawn earlier in the primary. She won the primary and then handily defeated Trump. In my dream, I didn’t feel the slightest bit surprised, as she was speaking to something much deeper in the human experience and needs, and that resonated with so many people who are tired of all the political games (and lies).

In my dream, I and others were helping her assemble an extraordinary, leading-edge cabinet. She was moving boldly forward on so many fronts, everything described above and much more – visionary shifts in how we organize society so that it serves everyone, heals what's broken, and repairs what's been ignored. I could viscerally feel the magic of what was happening in my bones. It felt inspiring, sweet and true.

When I woke from the dream that morning, into our current reality, the sweetness of course quickly evaporated. "Disheartened" doesn't begin to capture how I felt. I’ve worked with Marianne Williamson for more than twenty-five years and served as a volunteer policy advisor on both her presidential campaigns. So when I dream of her winning, it isn’t just idle fantasy – it’s the sadness of knowing how much her vision could have offered, and how thoroughly it was mocked, dismissed, and iced out by the establishment. While she was dismissed by many as unqualified, what should be obvious now is that she had the most important qualification of all: the prescience to see what was coming, and the courage to name what would be required to prevent it.

She saw what so many in the establishment and media could not – or refused to – see: that Biden represented the same corporate-controlled politics people were exhausted by, and that Democrats weren’t speaking to those frustrations or acting on them. And she warned that Trump had gained not just political traction but a psycho-spiritual hold on millions of Americans. She knew his message, however false, resonated with people’s fears and frustrations. She saw it clearly, long before most were willing to admit his force hadn’t waned in comparison to the milquetoast candidacies of Biden (and later Harris).

Marianne often quotes Franklin Roosevelt, highlighting three lessons we would do well to remember today. First, his insistence that we need not fear fascism as long as democracy delivers on its promises – promises like universal healthcare and tuition-free higher education, which she warned we had failed to fulfill. Second, his reminder that “a necessitous man is not a free man” – a truth made vivid in our current age of deepening inequality and inequity. And third, his conviction that the most important job of the presidency is not administrative, but moral leadership itself. Marianne embodied that principle in ways that could have moved the needle had she not been sidelined.