And so it has passed. The anticipated red wave made landfall last night and crashed down upon Congressional Democrats. Certainly, I was disappointed by last night’s results but not surprised. For those of us DREAMers, last night’s election could not have been seen as anything but a window into the future, and not surprisingly, many of us do not like what we see.
DREAMers, like any shadow population, cannot escape the ebb and flow of Congressional politics. We live by their pronouncements and perhaps even more so, by what they do not pronounce. Congress has remained silent on DREAM for close to a decade. I cannot defend any impotence on their part; it is their job to bring results, and they have not done so.
But what I have tried not to do is to give their incompetence any more importance than I have to. I will not let their every machination — or lack thereof — define who I am anymore. I’m not being insensitive to my fellow DREAMers who feel that our lives are dictated by Congress. I agree that they are. But I will not submit to defeat. For me, last night was business as usual, the manifestation of electoral fickleness in a majoritarian system. It does not change much except that it has made me firmer in my conviction that there is a great injustice in this country that is simply being ignored for the sake of political power. It makes me sick. Last night reaffirmed that the passage of this bill will be my lifelong aim. Even if I somehow become a citizen through other means and this bill has not yet passed, I will continue fighting for it. It means too much to me.
So our work must begin anew today. We will fight for DREAM in the lame duck session, and should that fail, we will fight for it with the GOP at the helm of the House. We must fight. We will die if we don’t.
