February 15, 2016
Repeated Mistakes 

We’re all human beings. We’re all different in our own ways.No matter whether we have a different skin color or legal status, we’re all the same; therefore we should be treated equally. It is a simple equation that many people could abide by, but don’t. Equality is a hard concept to understand and accept even after everything that has happened in our history. Differences in a person is complicated to swallow, no matter how hard we try to tell ourselves it is not.

Today, with the presidential election right around the corner, opinions are being turned into facts and it’s making people’s lives even harder. This is especially true for undocumented people whose destinies are held by strangers as candidates present their solution to the “problem.” But why should our legal statuses break the barrier of humanity? 

After everything this country has gone through, families continue to be broken. I can’t help but correlate today’s injustices with past events. In 1492, Christopher Columbus “discovered” America, and this lead to the greatest act of genocide in the world. Native Americans were categorized as savages, giving the excusable opportunity to remove children from their families to make them into upheld citizens of stolen land.

History has managed to repeat itself. Families are being broken and torn apart. When an individual is deported — or in legal terms — removed from this country, they lose the custody of their U.S. citizen children; and no one seems to care about the psychological trauma this has on the child and their family members. Why are we letting this happen again? Why do we continue to lie to ourselves and pretend nothing wrong is happening? History is a tool we should use to learn from, as a country and as a society. But we can’t learn from our mistakes when history lies to us with untruthful facts. We can’t keep masking our errors by turning away. We need to be proactive.

Together we can achieve. Together we can unite. We’ve gone through a lot as a country; we have done amazing things, but also horrible acts. But let us not feel guilty of what happened in history. Learning and realizing the injustices will help us become more accepting. And it all starts by accepting we are all equal. We are all different after all, but we are all human beings. Let this common factor open our eyes to realizing the destruction we have continued to repeat.

–Sandra Robledo Cornejo