Here’s what I know if DACA ends: that America let hate, fear-mongering, lies, innuendo, and bigotry win. And there is not now nor will there ever be an excuse for such a total and utter failure of society and civilization. The blame falls on all of us — we let things get this far through our collective inaction, our apathy, and our inability to reach others and remind them that being civilized means standing united with humanity, not divided against it.

You can say that the system is broken. You’re right. It is. One generation at a time, the system has been shredded by the very mentalities and ideologies presently in power. Because we let them. That, too, falls on all of us.

We practiced inaction and called it tolerance — tolerance of mentalities and ideologies that are inexcusable. We let hate, and bigotry, and all manner of poison spread like an unchecked cancer.

We practiced apathy and called it understanding. We couldn’t be bothered enough to actively engage and diffuse societal problems that are never going to go away. We are many-faceted race. We are never going to agree on everything all the time. It’s how we deal with those differences that matter most. Burying our heads in the sand will never be a solution.

And when all else failed, we practiced self-prescribed isolation. We fragmented and fractured, letting our unity crumbled, redrawing all the same old lines of segregation we used to cling to in our darkest chapters of history. We let the problems of others fester because it was ‘their’ problem and not ‘ours.’

So that’s why if DACA ends, America, once regarded as the greatest nation in the world, will truly be dead. There will be nothing left of those things that once made it truly great.