DREAMers make a good point but they don't make it well. A look at how overly aggressive activists can alienate constituents on the fence.
By: Matthew Murray -- Managing Editor
While the California Senate recently witnessed the signing into law of the DREAM Act, UCLA’s emotionally charged protesters ironically did more to alienate potential supporters of the act than make a positive impact. The “support” offered by UCLA’s resident DREAMers was, to no surprise unconstructive. Ask financial analysts about the act and they can tell you about the billions that it can generate. Ask ethicists, sociologists, and psychologists and they can tell you about the positive impact education can make for marginalized students and their families. Even ask Chancellor Block and he will laud the act as a huge step forward in the world of education. Just don’t ask students picketing on campus. Instead of just raising awareness of the merits of the DREAM Act or producing a carefully reasoned argument in a public forum, these DREAMers brought to the table hackneyed slogans and plenty of non-sequiturs. It’s as if UCLA has a team of minutemen protestors ready to drop everything, grab a poster board and markers, and run to campus for a day of hysterical shouting and protesting for the sake of protest.
For some reason, the protestors would rather vilify the opposition to their cause than simply promote their own. The DREAMers spent ample time attacking straw men as they chanted the truism, “dreams aren’t illegal” - which was also printed on their t-shirts. We all know that dreams aren’t illegal and we would tell anyone that disagreed that they are gravely mistaken - dreams, ambitions, and desires can’t possibly be illegal. What might be illegal is what it takes to realize a dream. If I dream of having a sports car, taking one from someone’s garage is still illegal. So, instead of producing a meaningful slogan that might have piqued students’ interest in the cause, they just made students like me scratch their heads in puzzlement as they hustled through the Bruinwalk gauntlet to class. However, the chanters kept chanting and I wondered just who hates the DREAMers dreams so much?
When in doubt, it’s usually safe to turn to a learned scholar teaching at UCLA. Professor and head of the UCLA Labor Institute Kent Wong had the answer to my question. As the person beating his chest for the protest du jour, he’s the go to guy. I learned from Mr. Wong that the culprit is the state and the people who run it. In other words, The Man is responsible for all this dream hating. While I thought that heads of state generally cared about other human beings (or at least the ones who vote for them), Wong’s enlightening discourse begs to differ. According to Mr. Wong, politicians are more interested in “big business research and development and training corporate leaders” and the federal government has a “deplorable track record of supporting repressive regimes.” Regarding undocumented immigrants, Mr. Wong explained that there is a “handful of people who are trying to block their dreams and aspirations.” I though this was a silly proposition. Who would want to block dreams? Does the state have a secret Department of Inception? The professor clarified, “let us be very clear what is behind the anti-immigrant hysteria in Congress today, and especially among certain Republican leaders in the U.S. Senate; it is racism pure and simple.”
I’d really like to land a good job after college so I tried looking for a state subsidized Corporate Leader Training Program, but I had no luck. I also wanted to find out who these racist politicians might be, but I couldn’t identify them. It started to feel as if I’d been sent on a goose chase by the questions that Mr. Wong was begging. Fortunately, he was able to explain. Apparently, you can become a successful corporate leader by being a beneficiary of the DREAM Act and the dream hating racists in the senate aren’t just any old politicians - they are old, white, and male. At a rally last year he told everyone, “the young people of the DREAM Act movement, will go on to accomplish and do great things with your lives....You will go on to become lawyers, teachers, doctors and members of the U.S. Congress to replace those old white men.” So there you have it. The Man and the greedy fat cats in the state legislature have just been keeping all the good UC bachelors degrees to themselves. With the passage of the DREAM act, corporations can hire new degree holding immigrants and we can finally out the “old white men” running the state - except for old white men like Jerry Brown of course. He did sign the DREAM act after all.
Matthew Murray is a third-year philosophy major. He can be reached at thebruinstandard@gmail.com
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