Everyone knows about the hockey riots last month in Dinkytown, in which several college students were arrested in response to the Gophers win against North Dakota (who knows what the scale of their "celebration" would be if they had lost). But a recent article in the Washington Post (http://tinyurl.com/p5jpbuf) describes a collection of significantly younger students who participated in an act of real civil disobedience when they sat in the street and attempted to stall an intersection. Their protest was an effort to prompt Congress and/or President Obama to end the deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants. The children were held for about three hours before they were released without charge, but the fact that they were willing to let this go on their personal records would be deplorable in the eyes of some students I know. This audacious move by kids much younger than the rioters in Dinkytown will serve as a source of inspiration for me, and I will always disregard news outlets that focus on unimportant sporting events and make the pleas of unfortunate children and families seem minuscule, especially in this time of great need for immigration reform.
Amie Stager, Eden Prairie
