My personal odyssey of Dreams Across America

On the morning of Saturday, June 16, 2007, Elizabeth dropped me at the entrance of Columbus Airport. We kissed and hugged each other. She wished me good luck when I walked into the hall with my luggage, a camera bag on my shoulder and a small handbag containing a few pieces of clothing. I was on a mission to fly to Chicago and then join up with other dreamers on a train that carried dreams from Los Angeles and other places along the way.

A fellow CA blogger, Terry over at TerryFacePlace wrote this moving piece marking today, June 19th known as Juneteenth, which celebrates the emancipation of the slaves. She ties it nicely into the immigration debate.
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Today is June 19th, otherwise known as Juneteenth.

Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration of of the emancipation of the slaves in the United States. The significance of June 19 is that day in 1865, Major General Gordon Granger landed at Galveston, Texas and announced the order that the slaves had been freed. This was two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and the reasons for this could be one of many, including the desire to not let them know so owners could reap another harvest, to the fact that there weren't enough Union soldiers to enforce it until Granger arrived. Nevertheless, they were finally freed from their enslavement, and Juneteenth is the celebration of that day.

Slavery was both an economic issue, and a moral issue in America, and slaves, alongside free men and indentured servants, were the people that built America.

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Well, the trip aboard the Dreams Train from Los Angeles to Chicago was in many ways a test of the Dreamers' endurance -- but so far, everyone's holding up well. We got cleaned up, fed, and rested in Chicago. We also got a fresh addition of even more Dreamers.

So as we pulled out of Union Station tonight, the energy was warm and positive. Everyone's looking forward to getting into D.C. this afternoon.

A lot has happened on the train. We have all gotten to know each other a lot more every day. Without exception we have gotten along fabulously and bonded. Even with a 7 hour train delay out of LA to San Antonio and being 3 hours behind schedule to Chicago we are in high spirits.

The immigration debate, for those progressives deeply involved in it, has felt rather like waiting for Godot -- we know our fellow progressives are going to be coming along any day now to join the journey toward effective reform. Still, we sit and sit, checking our watches as the clock ticks down, and we wonder.

Family values: We Americans love to talk about them and think about them right alongside patriotism and civic duty as the ultimate expression of our highest values.

So why do we have immigration laws that are specifically, almost devotedly, anti-family?

Many right-wing critics of American immigration policy are fond of saying that current policies would work fine if the government would "just enforce the laws that are on the books."

The United States of America is an Immnigrant Nation. We Americans collectively have forgotten the sacrifices of our ancestors. We Americans have sanitized the history of American immigration. We have santiized it to the point that we firmly beleive that our ancestors all came over on the Mayflower or through Ellis Island. We have conveneniently forgotten that our European ancestors were also economic refugees and came to the Americas in search of the ultimate American Dream.

A lot of people are probably wondering: Why undertake a project like Dreams Across America? What good will it do, really, to try to have conversations with other Americans about immigration?

Now, there's a surprise: Another Lou Dobbs report, another round of Bizarro Universe Journalism!

Dobbs and his regular partner in dubious journalism, Casey Wian, yesterday filed a report on the Dreams Train -- purportedly in the "regular news" portion of Dobbs' daily CNN broadcast, though you'd never be able to tell this "reportage" from the punditry that Dobbs likes to reserve for his second half -- that was, well, simply a train wreck in terms of journalistic fairness, accuracy, or general truthfulness.