I grew up with America on television.
Levi's and Coca-Cola commercials. Springsteen and Jackson on the radio, a Mustang in the driveway, dad at the grill on the 4th of July while mum came out with the apple pie. Homecoming parades with marching bands and cheerleaders in school colours, everyone with flags down Main Street.
Land of the free.
Land of opportunity.
That America we loved from a distance, and an industrial town in Michigan called Dearborn was the picture of it - Ford's hometown, the working man's dream, the American dream cast in steel.
Now watch the footage from Dearborn this week.
The parade. The banners. The community. It's all there. Still.
Almost can't tell the difference...
🤓
Dearborn is today America's first city with an Arab majority.
The mayor is Muslim. The police chief is Muslim. The city houses North America's largest mosque. This week, around 40,000 people dressed in black walked through the streets in a religious procession.
It wasn't a one-time event.
It's a fixed annual tradition, held for the 31st time.
And notice what it didn't require. No invasion. No conquest. It required birth rates, family reunification and a population that showed up in full numbers every single time, while the original residents moved away or looked the other way.
That's how a city changes hands today. Slowly enough that no one protests before the sums have already been done.
Dearborn is not the exception. Cities across Europe are following right behind. America just got its first. Europe stopped counting years ago. And meanwhile European politicians refuse to take it seriously, in a way where we must speak about it as though it constitutes a problem for Europe.
They betray their citizens year after year, while the numbers speak their own language.
The American dream was never just American. It was all of our picture of what a free society could be.
So try to imagine the last century if America back then had become what Dearborn has become now.
No Elvis, for the music was haram. No jazz, no blues, no rock'n'roll, no Motown, no Johnny Cash, no Springsteen on the radio. No Hollywood as we knew it, for the camera had to get past the censor first. No Marilyn Monroe over the ventilation grate. No Grease, no Dirty Dancing, no drive-in cinema with two teenagers in the back seat. No Star Wars, Indiana Jones, E.T., Back to the Future, Rocky, Godfather or Top Gun. No bikini on the beach in California. No Skateboard, Roller skates, ramps or Red Bull. No streetwear culture. No cheerleaders, no school dance, no first kiss under the bleachers.
No Woodstock. No Saturday Night Live. No stand-up comedy that made fun of the president on Friday and of God on Saturday. No Simpsons. No satire whatsoever, for satire requires that nothing is sacred from criticism, and that was precisely the sacred that no longer existed.
No woman behind the wheel of her own car, in her own dress, on her way to her own job. No Rosa Parks staying seated on the bus, for she would have sat behind a curtain. And been stoned if she had challenged the Law. Read that sentence again. No Martin Luther King, for his dream was preached from a church and illegal. No right to leave your faith without fearing for your life. No right to draw, write, sing or say what the power and the mosque didn't want to hear.
Everything we loved America for grew from one root -
FREEDOM.
And freedom is not a natural law. It is an inheritance. It exists only where someone defends it.
That's why the question isn't whether we dare talk about what happened to Dearborn. The question is whether we dare talk about it while it's still a question.
❤️🔥🪽
