Heard it on NPR: Lazy Americans

I heard a statistic on NPR today that seven out of ten new immigrants to the U.S. think Americans are lazy (WASP Americans I'm assuming). They profiled a chinese guy that came to America two years ago with $20 and now he's about to open his first restaurant with the $25,000 he saved. Making me look bad. Unless he lived in a cardboard box and ate discarded hamburger buns from the fast-food restaurant he worked at, I can't imagine how he did it. Strong kin & cultural ties helped, I'd bet.

IMHOP, the nuclear family was the downfall of white working-class America. We alienated ourselves from our extended families, abandoning a precious resource to strike off on our own and boast about rugged individualism while droves of immigrants proved again and again that blood is thicker than water and there is strength in numbers. Where I live, it's quite common to see whole families of Asian Indians, Chinese and Arabs running major chain restaurants and convenience stores. But you almost never see a WASP family running one. It takes serious cash to open a franchise these days and I can' imagine that someone who can barely speak English in this country has the net worth to open one on his/her own ($450,000 for a Dunkin Donuts -and that was five years ago!). But with the whole family pooling their resources together, enonomic as well as information resources, it creates an opportunity for everyone in the group.

Hell, I haven't even seen my aunts, uncles or cousins since my grandparents died in the seventies and eighties. Couldn't even tell you where they live. Who knows what things I might have learned, skills I might have acquired, had I had the benefit of their company and/or guidance earlier in my life. But my parents were part of the post WWII white flight from Detroit in the fifties. Once the extended family scattered into the surrounding suburbs, nobody bothered to keep in touch. Not even a damn reunion.

If working-class WASPS are lazier than their newly immigrated counterparts, it's probably one part expectation (we assumed we'd have what our parents had - i.e. "The American Dream"); one part isolation (loss of opportunity without our extended families) and one part constitution (we feel 'the pursuit of happiness' is our birthright - and the more instant that hapiness is, all the better).

I've worked consistently for 24 years and don't have very much to show for it. I don't think I 'm lazy. I'm just tired.