Part of cultural convictions, instilled from birth in defiance of all subsequent evidence, is that all those who came to these shores after the AMerican Revolution came under the umbrella of a common sense of unification even while reserving to their own families and groups the cultural heritage of their antecedents--whether Irish, Italian, Armenian, Polish, Jewish, Puerto Rican, Spanish, French or Ugandan. I am naively canalized into this inherent optimism about America despite all the best efforts of others to disabuse me.


A