At the core, however, these people who you so passionately try to pin down as lawbreakers, are our parents, in most of our cases.

Advocating for DREAM while using our experiences of what the American dream is about, while honoring the sacrifices our parents made, is OK. It is fine to claim to be your own person without culpabillity for your status, as long as you do so without hurting the bigger cause at hand, which is a more orderly way to immigrate so that parents like YOURS are not forced to make such painful decisions on behalfs of kids like YOU.

Advocating for DREAM while at the same time embracing the opposition's hateful rhetoric and divisive framework of the issue is counterproductive, and gives that opposition the security of ensuring we remain divided and ultimately, defeated. That is what is at stake and that's why we cannot effectively organize and be part of a broader coalition working on our behalf if we continue to be deadset on a bill, rather than in the future changes we seek not just for our generation but future ones.

Ultimately, I would accept your apology and understand your frustration over the image of the marches as you witnessed them. But the challenge remains to understand how much we are in this together even if our path to legal status will be different than our parents' path.