For just under half of younger adults, the only workable basis for ethnic co-existence was a tabula rasa. There was something fittingly American about this. To say they believed in “new beginnings” and “dreaming big” was the usual way Americans liked to think of themselves. Another way to put it, though, was to say that Americans were given to razing and fleeing rather than to repairing and nurturing. So grand and noble were Americans’ “dreams” in their own sight that carrying them out became a special dispensation, an emergency in the face of which others had better get out of the way. As
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