9:40 PM

Open Letter of Thank you to Our President Barack Obama!

Posted by Prosy Delacruz

Dear Mr. President: 50 years ago, you spoke to us of Dr. Martin Luther King's "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." Yesterday, that became true when health care reform was passed.! You opened the gates for us to appreciate that America's long history of slavery can be set aside through the strength of the last 2008 Presidential elections, even though it nurtured a culture of racism and set up an unequal but separate parallels of democratic universes, one for the white folks, another for folks of color. We went to Washington, D.C. our first to witness your inauguration, after being a citizen of America for 31 years. You appealed to the better side of America to elect you and to understand that we are one America, an America who is kind and compassionate. Yet, after you got to office, only the unkind, the greedy and the virulent loud voices of America came together to derail our common progress. But you would not let them, you saw a way of integrating us again, setting aside the financial wrongs, and working for a number of structural and regulatory solutions to anchor the economy right again and it did. But you did not stop there! Mr. President, what you did in the health care reform, even if your involvement was late in the legislative process, and perhaps fittingly so such that there be a real separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches, was to integrate our histories as a people, all the way from slavery to racism to the elections of the first African American president to now health care. We can now look back and say our unfinished struggles of a century on health care reform is no longer our burden. We can now move forward and we are! I am crying as you did not allow the lynching by words, the use of caustic and toxic words to derail you from integrating us once again as a kind, civilized nation. Mr. President, what you did is not just health care reform, you made us look back to these centuries of struggle and recapture what is good about America!


Thank you very much Mr. President, you will never know the extent of healing you have done for communities of color by this leadership act of yours! It is more than commendable, it is historically magnificent! Your mom and grandmom must be very proud that you learned your bill of rights so well and made it truly a reality for all of us, such that the pursuit of happiness is based on a healthy well-being of a nation and responsible personas of its citizens to care for those who have less and you did it for us!

P.S. But, you know Mr. President that while we will give you a space to honor your victories, savor your successes on this one, even lick some wounds that you may have had in the process, but perhaps not, we appeal to you to do a more comprehensive immigration reform that makes uncommon sense, uncommon in its humanity, uncommon in breaching the walls of separation, uncommon in really making America the beacon of light in the world that we all who once were foreigners, and now its beloved citizens also, believe in its spirit to draw us to these foreign shores to leave all that we love, all that we were comfortable with, all that we know so we can risk having a good life, let us now have a much better country that is more generous and less hateful, that is more kind and less scornful, that is more patient with reunifying families and less disablingly - cold to their yearnings. For as we allow these breaches, these separations of families that last for decades, we are simply keeping our country from harvesting God's unlimited grace. We are the United States of America and to those who did not know freedom before we learned it well through your example, and by the power of the ballot that change can happen for the better with a new president, and much more so when that president is you, Mr. Obama, who works for the highest common good of all! May you be guided in leading us to unify our country as we pass the next humane immigration reform bill ever to unify families! In unification is peace, in peace, we can settle more wars to end, but at first, we must end the wars within ourselves in this nation and unify our undocumented residents through a process of citizenship, with the rest of us! Under God, we are indivisible as a nation, may we behave as one family of immigrants once here and now!

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