For years I thought I’d grown up in a family that sneered at the American Dream. We believed it was a naive fantasy of immigrants who were unable to accept that our streets weren’t really paved with gold, who were brainwashed by politically motivated propaganda. Certainly, my parents were, and are, deeply cynical about the political process and what it means economically for people without advantages or connections.
Not that we were poor. My father had a middle-management position at a major corporation, and both of my parents had gone to college. But my father’s income was stretched over seven children and the mortgage on a house big enough to hold all of us, plus the occasional needy relative. Money was tight.
