• No doubt it will be quite an ordeal when I finally come to grips with a personal story as told by the purportedly “evil” characters against who I’d managed to concoct a semblance of “goodness” to ascribe to myself. I don’t know that I have attained the ‘converted’ position required to do that yet. It is much easier to think of oneself unveiling the phony sin/righteousness distinctions used by others, isn’t it?

    Although I don’t have a retelling of a story of Andrew as an individual, here is an attempt at retelling a story that is quite common to the contemporary American citizenry (of which I’m a member):

    Most American daily news broadcasts will make some reference to stock market indices. An assessment of the nation’s economic outlook is regarded as a staple in a mature information diet, and daily NYSE and DOW J percentage points are easily digestible. There is, however, rarely any mention of the millions of undocumented workers who, by virtue of garnering remarkably substandard wages and benefits, subsidize large swathes of our nation’s economic output in agricultural, construction, and service sectors.

    When attention is explicitly drawn to them in news broadcasts, somehow the contribution these workers make to the national economy is omitted. Of course, there are a few outlets who regularly fault them for “gaming” a broken immigration system, and this obviously leaves no vantage point from which to see them as benefactors to our economy. However, even in those news reports in which individuated undocumented laborers are pitied and depicted as maltreated by ruthless government policies, the truth is still not heard. This workforce is not merely an amalgam of unfortunates in our midst; their illegitimacy is actually a boon to our economy! Legal residents (as an aggregated block) are profiting from the lousy remuneration of those who can’t demand better. We use a few green (or red) percentage points flashed on the screen before the local sports report to substantiate a tall tale of a promising (or faltering) economic recovery, without acknowledging the full costs to our paperless neighbors.

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