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One day, I'm going to write a diary about how transformative a president Obama has been, a diary that will serve both as a condemnation of conservative Republicans' ultimately unsuccessful attempts to sabotage his presidency and as a condemnation of some progressive Democrats' insistence that Obama hasn't really done all that much or didn't deliver what we entrusted him to. That diary will come, but this one isn't it.
I want to talk here about a fairly specific example of social progress we can all believe in and should be proud of, because President Obama has tonight committed to a most admirable, bold, and necessary act of transformational justice: to make the lives of millions of people within America's borders better, to protect the sanctity of the family in a population of human beings who came here to flourish, and to create an environment in which people are rewarded for contributing to our nation's future rather than punished for choosing our nation over another in their past.
Five million people will no longer have to live in fear of being separated from others who they love and depend on. Said our President during his announcement tonight on immigration reform:
“Are we a nation that tolerates the hypocrisy of a system where workers who pick our fruit and make our beds never have a chance to get right with the law?” ...Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in.”
America, harrowing and complicated a past as it has, is only as great as its willingness to give people a chance to move forward, to hope and to dream, to progress along an arc that perpetuates progress rather than regression, that honors the importance of change in reaching for better and more just rather than settling for protections for the powerful at the perpetual expense of the powerless. Allowing individuals who come here without any power the opportunity to create new futures for themselves and their young while improving on the imperfect experiment that is America is a capstone of our democracy if one can be said to exist. Occasionally, we need our lions to remind us of that.
As Peter Beinart of The Atlantic puts it, Obama "has decided once again to trigger the hatred of defenders of the status quo because, I suspect, he knows American history well enough to know that real moral progress doesn’t happen any other way".
The would-be-activist-turned-President tonight declared, "We shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger — we were strangers once, too." In doing so, and in putting forth a plan to fold those strangers into our society, Obama lived up not only to what Beinart describes as "the promise that a black man with a Muslim name who had worked in Chicago’s ghettos—a man who had tasted what it means to a stranger in America—would bring that memory with him when he entered the White House", but also to the promise of his Nobel: "extraordinary efforts to strengthen...cooperation between peoples".
On display tonight was a truly extraordinary and indisputably progressive effort to strengthen our nation through reform that will make millions of peoples' lives better and our society a more cooperative, symbiotic place on which to build a foundation for a brighter future.
This is the change I signed up for.