A DREAM Deferred. Again.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--
and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load

 Or does it just explode?

--Langston Hughes

In my experience, it sits in the glow of a laptop and feels frustrated tears gather even though the news stories on the screen are absolutely no surprise, just exactly as expected. Life is so unfair.

Today the illegal immigrant bogeyman scared off enough of our Senators (I wonder who cleans their toilets, and if they're brave enough to piss alone) that they voted down, once again, the opportunity to even debate the DREAM Act, Dick Durbin's piece of legislation that would create a path to residency and citizenship for young people who were brought here as children without papers. You can imagine that I'm kind of invested, even though, for me, it's a secondhand dream.

I'm not the young man working sixty hours a week and attending community college full-time at the one local school that will take him, hush-hush under the table, as long as he can pay the inflated international student rate. As an official resident of nowhere, it's the one choice he has 'til these lawmakers come through, somewhere around the Twelfth of Never.

I'm not any of these high school seniors, working towards their coming commencement with the degrees of intensity found in any classroom across the commons or down the hall. I am just the one who has to tell them, again, that nothing has happened, and likely won't, for them. Their personal representative of America the well-intentioned. The sorry. The greedy. The failed.

And to think just today my new Brazilian friend told me Americans were "all good." I just smiled. Thank baby Jesus, I guess, that he cannot quite read the comments section on these various wire reports, herds of jackasses typing in furied unison. Such hate and racism and illogic does not inspire me to be "all good." But then I think again of Rafael, the overworked college student, who does. "People are ignorant," he once said to me. "I'm just going to do what I need to do and hope they stay out of my way."