MN-05: How Omar's daughter showed her that Congress cannot 'pass the buck' to the next generation
young people held a rally at the state capitol in St. Paul, calling for stronger gun control legislation. The demonstration hit home for her in more ways than one—it was led by her daughter, Isra Hirsi.
In that moment, Omar was reminded that she had been just a year older than her daughter’s age when the Columbine High School massacre occurred in 1999. “If my generation had acted with the urgency that her generation had acted,” she wonders, “would my daughter be at the state capitol asking for us to introduce sensible gun laws and to protect the lives of young people?” Omar shared the memory on Monday, when she and now 17-year-old Hirsi—who is cofounder of the U.S. Youth Climate Strike—joined a virtual conversation as part of Fortune Most Powerful Women’s “Paying It Forward” series.
Omar, a Democrat who in 2019 was elected to represent Minnesota’s Fifth District in the U.S. House of Representatives, said that moment of realization is one of the reasons she fights for “transformative change, because I know that complacency is what brought us here.” Hirsi’s action helped her understand “how we don’t have the luxury of waiting another year or two or three and passing the buck to the next generation.”
She said that while she’s not naive, she does tend to be the optimist in the room, and she is hopeful that the current social justice movement taking place in the U.S. would prevail.
Omar, who is one of just two Muslim women in Congress, pointed to history for supporting evidence, noting that the Montgomery bus boycott lasted 395 days before a single change took a place. The police killing of George Floyd occurred on May 25, and on June 25, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was passed. “Within 30 days, not only did we introduce a piece of legislation, we debated it in committee and passed it on the House floor,” she said. “That kind of rapid change has never been possible in our nation’s history, period.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rep-ilhan-omar-daughter-showed-220411859.html
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