We’re pretty good at humiliating one another even after we’ve been here for years. Very few grandees came here bathed in adoration. Give me your “wretched refuse,” Emma Lazarus wrote. The dehumanizing treatment of asylum seekers on the southern border. The horror of the slave ships and bondage.
The religious persecution of the Puritans.
The degrading poverty of the Irish famine. I thought about what a large role humiliation has played in American history: The pogroms and the Holocaust that terrorized Jews and sent them fleeing. Wednesday night I had the chance to walk around Lower Manhattan where my ancestors immigrated and built new lives, and to talk with some more recent immigrants whose experiences were similar to my family’s, though separated by decades and origins. So we cast about for more realistic and inclusive ways to retell our story. As that story has faded, our country has fractured, without a cohering national narrative. That triumphalist story sounds tinny in 2021, and it seems to have been rejected by many in the younger generations. When I was a kid, I was told a certain triumphalist story about America, which was loaded with words like “superpower” and “greatest.” A nation is a community of people that, at best, is held together by a common story.
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