Here is a wonderful essay on the stories we tell, our familys' narratives which shape our existence and our memory. An anthropologist’s theory is that white middle-age Americans “have lost the narrative of their lives.” "... one afternoon, Grandpa drove to my childhood home to say Grandma no longer knew him and had told him her husband was dead. Standing in our kitchen, he wept as if he had lost everything." During this long campaign, a candidate has warned that immigrants are stealing both employment and the American story; according to some of the scripts traveling across teleprompters, the immigrant population is—along with excessive taxation and regulation of business—a major cause of unemployment. In these contemporary Jim Crow yarns, immigrants are shiftless and yet labor long hours for employers who pay starvation wages rather than hiring U.S. citizens and paying them well."
At www.commonwealmagazine.org
