Hopey Changey Stuff, Or ...

...Been down so long it looks like up to me.

Welcome to America, brown brothers and sisters, and welcome to the table, the one that you will set but will not be allowed to sit at. It's not your time.

Like African Americans, women, and gays, you will have to wait your turn, and that will be years from now because more important issues will take precedence. The economy which brought lower billion dollar profits to the mega-corps, health care reform to fully fund insurance companies, Wall Street bailouts for the dim bulbs who lost billions but were paid millions: they are more important than your piddling concerns about legalization of your status after you have paid huge amounts into government accounts you will never be able to access, or about deportation splitting your families at the drop of a hat at the whimsy of a county sheriff who is all about padding his hours on prime time television.

You are simply not that important, even though hundreds of thousands of you spent ten times that number to become citizens so that you could introduce this country to its latest citizens by electing a man who promised to give you a break, to level the playing field. He isn't interested, nor are those members of Congress you turned out for in November, 2008. They have a crisis, or several crises, or something, to deal with, and a bunch of Mexicans, Central Americans, Chinese, Ethiopians, Haitians, Armenians will have to do what my Polish ancestors and my colleague's Japanese parents did. Sit back and wait your turn.

Or you can do something about it, as Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-Chicago) hinted at recently in Los Angeles:

Many Latinos are furious at President Obama for failing to deliver on promises to push immigration reform legislation and may stay away from the polls during this year's midterm elections if they don't see concrete progress, including legalization of undocumented immigrants, a key Democratic legislator said Monday.

“People are angry and disillusioned,” U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Chicago) said in an interview with The Times.

Gutierrez said that Obama’s failure to push immigration reform was symbolized by his State of the Union address last Wednesday, when he devoted only 38 of about 7,300 words to the issue. The “throwaway line,” Gutierrez said, was the final straw for many activists who have been perturbed by the continued pace of deportations and other enforcement actions without concomitant progress in moving reform legislation forward.

Gutierrez said he was short at least 12 votes in the House to pass his immigration legislation, which would legalize most of the nation’s 12 million undocumented migrants, provide more family visas, increase worker protections and offer other reforms. He acknowledged that selling the bill to the American public at a time of double-digit unemployment would not be easy.

Of course it won't be easy, but it's not impossible. It took just a couple of brave students to sit in at a Woolworth's lunch counter and one woman to refuse to sit in the back of the bus to get the nation's attention. Two years ago, a million of you hit the streets in Los Angeles and got the same attention. That wasn't quite enough then, but it might be now.

A hundred thousand of you, along with those of us who know your time has come, showing up in Washington, DC might get a little attention. But if those hundred thousand of you make it clear that you are willing to stay home in November, 2010 rather than vote for the Democrats who sold you out in the 111th Congress maybe, just maybe, the Democrats will have to pay attention. Barbara Boxer is in for a serious fight. President Obama's "safe seat" in Illinois doesn't look so safe anymore. Harry Reid may find himself on the board of some mining company come January 2011.

Don't let them kid you: this is your time, just like it is the time for those of us who believe in the promise of this nation. We just have to stand up and shake our fists. Given the condition of the spines of those in elective office, that should be enough.