This is beautifully written and you have such a poignant and compelling story. It’s unfortunate I think that immigrants and children of immigrants carry such idealistic hopes and aspirations about this country, so when the complexities of reality on the ground reveal themselves, the fall is long and the ground is hard.

You’d have to go back hundreds of years to find my immigrant past: I was a child during Vietnam, a teen during Watergate, a young adult in NYC during the conservative wet dream called the Reagan administration. I never held such high ideals about this country, so I don’t think I had as far to fall as so many immigrants do when reality sets in.

But I’ve grown to love and accept the grand ideal that is the United States because I’ve grown to love the ideal within myself. We all have to be better actors when those who should be upholding those ideals are bad actors.

It is “we the people” after all. The America you are talking about didn’t stop existing, it never existed. It still is, and always has been, a work in process. Don’t be discouraged because there are some loathsome opportunists at the helm right now, we are all equally American in the effort to bring the criminals down and restore hope for that ideal.

Go back far enough and we were all immigrants once.