Lost DREAM

Molly Ivins once described American history as one long, repeated struggle to extend constitutional rights to everyone. And always against the vituperative opposition of conservatives. Every. Single. Time.

Yesterday that effort took a step forward with the repeal of DADT, and one back with the defeat of DREAM.

Blue Girl:

My children are disappointed today. As happy as they are that Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed, they are at least that disappointed that the DREAM Act failed.

That is because they are twenty-something. They went to Catholic schools of the more liberal, Jesuit persuasion and they all had two or three friends and classmates who were educated alongside them, who came here as infants or toddlers, who had younger siblings who were born here, who were every bit as "American teenager" as my kids were.

They played soccer on their soccer teams, they hung out at Fritz's after school, they went to dances, they earned good grades, they made their parents proud and they graduated high school right alongside their peers. Several of them I would have recognized first based on their ass sticking out of my refrigerator.

Then, after graduation, they faded away. They didn't go to Rockhurst or KU or MU or K State. They didn't continue their educations because they were barred from receiving financial aid. They didn't go into union trades like many of the middle-class blue collar kids whose families had been members of the plumbers, electricians or carpenters union for generations and there was no family business to go into.

They just became ghosts.

My son noticed this the first time over Christmas break his sophomore year at Rockhurst. He and a bunch of his high-school classmates got together at a taqueria in the neighborhood where they went to school and one of their classmates, one of the smartest kids in the class, was working there as a dishwasher.

Another classmate of my daughter's, who also happens to be a chef, told us about going to work at a hotel after graduating from culinary school and seeing one of their classmates, a girl this time, working on the housekeeping staff. When he mentioned her, my daughter brightened and launched into how awesome her short stories and poetry had been when they were in AP English together. "I hoe she's still writing..." she said hopefully -- but it trailed off before she got the words out. She knows better.

My kids know the price these kids have paid for their parents sin of answering the siren song of good wages paid by companies that would willfully look the other way on the whole proper documents issue. And they know how stupid it was to cut off their classmates from bright futures. They know that such stupidity has cost society doctors and lawyers and teachers and engineers -- and those are just among people they know personally.

Read the whole thing.

Have you talked to your Democratic neighbors today?