American immigration, then and now.
I came to this country tucked under the arm of my father, who had a suitcase in the other hand and that is all. My mother, my father, my sister, and me, 7 years old, sick from the trip and not too much more helpless than my parents in this new country, America. My parents saw America’s roads paved with gold, literally. Our soviet imagination came into contact with American propaganda, in spite of the control the soviets had on media. The knowledge of America, the rock and roll, the jeans, the freedom, the color, the land of plenty, all of it permeated into the bleak, colorless, existence we were all used to. And it didn’t disappoint. Walking into a supermarket for the first time, my pupils dilated with the brightness and variety of advertising and products on display. We never saw such things except for the short stay in a midway house in Vienna, Austria, when I walked through the streets with my sister and gazed at the wonderful window displays of the shops. It was !979, and even though the malaise that Carter talked about was in its hay day. The United States was the center of the universe, the shining castle on the hill, the promise of endless opportunity, Life, liberty, and that strange pursuit of happiness.
40 years ago, we only saw one side of the coin, We believed in the goodness of this nation, perhaps extremely naively, but this is what we were constantly fed and it was far better than what we were accustomed to behind the iron curtain. It still is, I must say. There came a turn, a reckoning of sorts. One that we individual human beings come to understand in ourselves and others, that one side of the coin is never enough to know the whole story. Nations are like individuals. A nation's culture is like an individual’s psychology and both require Carl Jung’s words, Shadow Work.
What is the shadow? in short, it is the other side of the coin. it is that which you hide from yourself and hope to hide from others. None of us want to face this terrible side of ourselves, the side capable of acting or reacting badly, immorally, opportunistically, and pragmatically. Nations have shadows as well, but in our naivete, and I would say most immigrants were naive in this sense, the United States represented only the good. Immigrants came here eager to assimilate into the ‘good” the American narrative provided a safe place for morally minded, hard-working individuals, seeking opportunities that they never had in their home countries. The American dream was real, and The Shadow was yet to be detected.
One decade passed into another, the narratives of all nations began to falter with the advent of information technology, each pillar of perceived goodness began to show the rot on its edges where pragmatics disassociate from ethics. The shadow became more and more visible in all of our Western nation's narratives. And the gleam from the city on the hill began to lose its brilliance. Immigrants kept coming, but the urge to assimilate began to weaken as the American narrative became less and less appealing. The American dream was no longer a dream in the mind of the middle class, which is where most immigrants tended to land. We began to get a constant echo from the world, that America was not great, that it committed many war crimes, that it took down governments, that it consumed without discretion., in short, instead of it being the repository of the best of human civilization it was just an empire of consumerism on the march. Our pursuit of happiness became all about what we can buy, what we can have, what we can possess. The endless supply of cheap goods and our desire to possess this nonsense with no pragmatic necessity, consumerism itself began to possess our souls.
40 years later, it is 2019, and our immigrants no longer assimilate like they used to. Our narrative is no longer overriding, instead of fragmented into whatever identity it pleases. Identity politics are the fashion and narrative reinterpretation is the means through which the identitarians manipulate agendas. One can hardly blame immigrants for not assimilating, for they no longer feel like the dream is here. All immigrants and it seem most citizens, when lacking a unifying narrative tend to revert to their cultural biases, ethnic distinctions, and the closest tradition they can rely upon for stability. This is not just an American phenomenon it is the overarching nemesis to western civilization. E pluribus unum gives way to ex uno plures .
We can call this period, The Great Fragmentation. The Narrative gatekeepers are no longer capable of the information distortion that came to them so easily for the past few hundred years. This breakdown of our own self-image seems to be what the West is going through and it is not a mystery why citizenship has become such a zero-sum game. Unifying codes no longer unify. Their credibility is breaking down one institution at a time.
Shadow work, The west is doing it now. It will take some time to pass through this maturation process, it will be painful in the short and mid-term but I am optimistic, for the idea of the West is still the best. For what its worth, I still thank my lucky stars that my parents made the difficult journey of picking up life and transplanting it into another land. A difficult journey for anyone, but it has a certain amount of responsibility with it, We come to this nation not only to partake in its bounty but to reaffirm its ideal.