First and foremost I want you all to know that during these rough times, you are not alone. I know what it feels like to live in constant fear that two of the most important individuals in our life could be taken away from us at any given moment. As the elections results filled my social media feeds, I was in complete shock. It was in a matter of seconds that tears filled my eyes and I was overcome with an abundance of never ending questions and concerns on how this election will impact my family. I could not stop thinking about the pain that every undocumented immigrant must be feeling, and how much I hate this man for impossing so much fear on them.
Let me first say, if you feel hate, I am right there with you. Never in my short 20 years of life have I felt this way of someone that I had never even met before in my life, especially not someone who was involved in politics. As we sit here, and try to understand why all of this happened, we need to put our hate aside. We need to put all our anger, sadness and emotions behind us, and not let them control our actions. It is important to remember that our families need us now, more than ever. Our parents have gone through too much for us to just give up on our hope. Our younger brothers and sister are in tears because of what they hear on television, they are scared that this unfamiliar man is going to send their parents back to Mexico and pull apart our families. How can we answer a question that we don't even know the answer to?
Now is definitely not the time to give up hope, it's the time to do the opposite. It's the time to stand up taller than ever and remain optimistic. Although it sounds impossible to be okay with the fact that our future is in the hands of someone who has called our families "rapist" and "drug dealers," the sad and hurtful reality is that we can't change what has happened. We can't change the fact that Donald Trump will become the President of this country, this country that in the past has done so much to progress and evolve in the integration of ethnicities and cultures. We must not allow for the people around us to take one step back.
Now more than ever we must unite, and fight for the rights of our parents as they so willingly have fought for ours.
