Yearning to Breathe Free

A much younger friend of mine shares with me the experience of having worked during college in a restaurant, she as a waitress and I as a dishwasher.  Though from an affluent family, she had parents who wisely insisted that she get her college spending money by working. The most important thing she learned, she says, is how it feels to be treated like dirt.  I fully understand that, but find that another interesting outcome was that neither of us is resentful.  That, for us, is because in our separate times and places, we each knew that the experience was temporary, not a lifelong burden, and that better times were coming.  We had hope, and hope is the opposite of resentment.

After the Boston bombings, the newspapers are filled these days with analyses of just who the young bombers were.  The most colorful of these analyses is the one offered by “Uncle Ruslan”, their uncle and a fellow immigrant from Chechnya, who said among many other things that “they’re losers.”  In obvious ways, he’s right.  One is dead and the other likely faces, at best, life imprisonment, they’ll both be remembered not for accomplishments but for the pain they caused, and any dreams that they, particularly Dzhokhar, the younger brother, had for successful careers are vanished.  But in saying that, Uncle Ruslan misses a great truth of the American immigrant experience. That truth is the one found in Emma Lazarus’s poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore..”  Almost all our ancestors came to America because they were losers elsewhere.  The rich and successful stayed home.  All that our immigrant ancestors had were the clothes on their back and hope.  They came and had to start again from scratch, usually in a menial job, often having to learn a language entirely new to them, and bringing with them the memories of the wrongs and oppressions they had faced previously.  It was hope for a better future that sustained them.   America's great accomplishment was turning losers into winners.

The radicalization of the brothers, particularly the older one, which led to their reprehensible actions signals that the hope had been replaced by resentment.  That in no way excuses their actions; millions of immigrants before them have lost their hope, some returning in despair to the places they had left, without resorting to terrorism.  But it does point to ways we can better achieve our own dreams as a nation, to be the lamp beside the golden door.

At a talk I attended a few years ago by the director of a large home for troubled youth, he described how most of them, the products of alcoholic or drug-ridden families, had been shipped from foster home to foster home for years; they had lost all trust in others, acted out violently, and had no hopes. They are the losers.   It took an average of three years just for them to relearn trust.   That was in a carefully constructed, highly caring environment.  The pride of the home was in how many of them they turned into successful adults.  The real secret was that they cared about each one of them and refused to accept them as losers.  They restored hope, child by child.

We today as a nation face influxes of refugees from the troubled spots of the world, asylum seekers from political oppression, as were the Boston bombers.  They are our national “troubled youth” (though we have plenty that are fully home grown), and it is our responsibility as a nation to find ways that turn them into responsible citizens, not bombers.  Treating immigrants in general hostilely as crime-prone, untrustworthy losers will not do the job.  Doing so helps create bombers.  Again, most immigrants survive the experience of being treated hostilely as aliens and of having some of their dreams shattered, and go on to successful citizenship, but the less hostility and the more supportive care they face, the less likely we are to experience resentful bombers.  Radicalization, religious or otherwise, is a product of resentment.  We need to appreciate that the growing fragmentation of our country between the wealthy with unbounded hopes and the poor and marginalized who have none itself contributes to our terror.  We need to appreciate how it feels to be treated like dirt and to see no hope of ever doing better, enough to do things about it.