THE NEXT MILLION MEN

Who wants to save a country, you ask, that can’t even give you a job? Well, it may not be the country you want or the country you deserve, but it’s the country you live in. It’s where your kids live. And it’s those kids who are going to turn the country around.”

You know your kids are in danger. And you know that the biggest danger to your kids is not that they could get hit by a bullet on the way home from school — which they could — but that they could go nowhere for the rest of their lives. Your kids, the ones in the crummy cities, the ones getting a fake education in crummy school systems, are as bad off as your grandparents were on their unpaved streets in the smalltown South. Worse. Your kids can’t even take a walk and go fishing.

You don’t need to go back to school or get rich or even get a job to save your children. But you will have to endure more than your share of discomfort. In fact, you’ll probably take a lot of abuse. From all sides and all angles. Because what you have to do is give up on yourself. To give your kids a chance, a real chance, at making it in America, you’re going to have to give up on what it is that fuels the great American fires of motivation these days, self-fulfillment.

What’s self-fulfillment got to do with it? You’re just looking for a job, right? Well, it’s the national creed of self-fulfillment that is keeping you from doing what you’ve got to do. Which is a whole lot more than buy your son the Nikes he thinks he has to have.

You say unemployed men don’t go around talking about self-fulfillment. They don’t have to. They’ve got an entire generation of journalists, educators, mental-health professionals, clergypersons, and magazine-based feminists to do it for them. All those folks swear by self-fulfillment. And they can’t swear off it. Because the minute they start to look at the mess they’ve made of their children’s lives, of your children’s lives, in the interest of becoming the well-paid professionals they believe they deserve to be, they get cold sweats and the shakes. So they don’t think about what a cancer the goal of self-fulfillment is. But you can. You have to. Because what it is you’ve got to do is become an immigrant and re-enter America.

That’s right. The one thing you can do right now to save the kids, save the people, save the country, is to give up your rights as an American citizen.

What rights? Well, you don’t have to give up the ones in the Constitution. Not that they seem to be doing you a whole lot of good right now. But you have to give up the rights that really matter to native-born Americans.

The right to whine.

The right to demand service.

The right to be supported.

The right to fulfill yourself.

You have to be an immigrant with none of those rights. Even though you and your ancestors have been here longer than all but about 5 percent of the country. Even though you by rights should be showing immigrants how to do it. Even though, if things were fair, you’d be as much a role model as Colin Powell or John Shalikashvili or Henry Kissinger or Jerry Springer or Peter Jennings. Unfair as it may seem, you should be doing everything you can to lead your life as if you were just off the boat.

Because immigrants make it. Time and again. They come here without a dime, and within a generation it seems like every last one has his own business, and kids in Stanford, passing not just you but about 30 million other natives who stand by blinking in disbelief and resentment. But the immigrants don’t care. And if they can make it, so can you. All you’ve got to do is remember one thing. But then you’ve got to make everything you do reflect that one thing. What you’ve got to remember, what the immigrants never forget, is this: Family first. Family first.

Not self-fulfillment. Not legal rights. Not stuff. Not style. Not sports. Not church. Not country.

Family. Family. Family. Family.

Not Marian Edelman’s family. Not Phyllis Schlafiy’s family. Not Coretta King’s family. Not John Gotti’s family. Not the Family of Man. Not the new family down the block with two dads or the nice lady who just had a baby without ever having to meet a man. Your family.

Your family first. The immigrant way. Everything you do, every day of your life, should be aimed at putting your family ahead of everybody around you. You work the system to get them ahead. It’s retrogressive. It’s anti- democratic. It’s unfair to other families. And it works. You know it does. You’ve seen how the Koreans are doing here. How the West Indians are doing. How the Russians are doing. How the Palestinians are doing.

Does being an immigrant mean you have to run a grocery store from five in the morning to midnight? Do your children and your grandmother have to stock the shelves and keep the peach cans dusted? Does nobody get a day off?. Can there be no nice car for the weekend? Maybe.

Does being an immigrant mean nobody ever gets to look sharp? That you live in too few rooms with no television set for the video games? Probably.

But that’s just the small stuff. The hardest thing, the most important thing, is that you are going to have to take control of your children. Tight control. Like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Because the great immigrant dream is to get your children educated. Not graduated. Educated. Every last immigrant wants to see his children sucking every bit of income-enhancing, class-elevating, caste-eliminating morsel of education out of what is still the greatest system of cheap, universal education in the world. That should be your dream, too. It must be. The immigrants who make it, make that dream come true.

And how they do it is so very interesting. And you can do it, too, if you ignore your enemies, the people working the education racket. Because those condescending administrators, hypocritical union offcials, ignorant professors of pedagogy, and program-crazy politicians, so many of whom send their kids to private schools, by the way, are going to tell you that you don’t have the education yourself to do the job. That educators are the only people with the stuff your children need.

What you have to know to protect yourself from the people who have already proved that they can’t handle your kids is that the immigrants who are soaring to the top of the SATs have been coached by people who don’t even speak English, much less do higher math. They’ve been coached by their families. In a lot of families, the kids are coached by grandparents while the parents are running up seams or stacking canned peas. The tutors are old people who are too scared to leave the apartment. But they’re not scared of the kids. They don’t believe the kids when the kids say they don’t have homework. And they don’t let the kids close their books until it’s time to clear the table for supper.

Your situation, gentlemen, is different. It’s not age that’s keeping you from a paying job. And the mother of your kids may be married to someone who doesn’t want you in his house. Your children’s mother might have a job that makes her think she’s got the moral upper hand. But you can have the same effect as those grandparents. You’ve got the time. And you’re bigger than the kids. You can meet those children at school and take them to your home to study. Or to a church basement. Or a library. Any place that has no television set will do. You can sit with your children, right at the same table, all afternoon. You can tell your children that there won’t be any basketball games or video games or telephone time or little visits with friends. There won’t be any of that until the homework is done and done right.

This will be the hardest thing you will ever do in your life. Your children will revile you. No, that’s too mild. They will become your worst nightmare. You will think that they have been possessed by demons. They will lie on the floor and scream. They will call you names that will make you want to smack them in the chops. Their friends will phone them and page them and your children will tell you are violating federal law if you don’t let them answer. The kids on the other end will probably be every bit as nasty. That’s why, if you can swing it, the church basement might be your best bet as a study hall.

Once they understand that you aren’t kidding, your kids will go on strike. This may last for weeks or months. But sooner or later one of them, probably a girl, will crack. Girls are a little more sensible than boys and a lot more politically astute. One of the girls will probably try studying just for the pleasure of making the boys furious. And you will have begun to win.

No-nonsense, boot camp discipline is what you want to keep in mind. You want fast justice when you deal with children who are trying to get out of learning. They need to know that they have no choice. As long as you are alive and breathing, you are going to see that they stay inside and crack the books. That’s the immigrant way.

Your kids will study. They will study because there’s nothing else to do. And they will study because it will matter to them what you think. The hostage syndrome will kick in, the one that brings prisoners around to the point of view of their captors. But something else will come into play, too. You are going to replace the great bugaboo of American teenage life, the peer group. Kids, who are assumed to have no minds of their own, are supposed to respond to peer pressure over every other influence. Well, they’re not going to be seeing a lot of those peers. They’re going to be seeing you. They’ll be seeing more of you than they see of their teachers, their television sets, maybe even their mothers. You will begin to matter in a way that you didn’t matter before, and in a way that will differ from the people who are paid to deal with your children, and in a way that peer groups don’t. Unless your children are so stupid that they can’t learn anything, they will eventually learn that, unlike teachers, peer groups, politicians, or television sets, you have a real interest in their doing better.

It’s only fair to warn you that you might get in trouble for this. Some social worker from a bureau somewhere may show up to see about the crying and moaning. Lie to them. Tell them you’re a counselor from a federally funded, locally planned program for at-risk kids. When your children try to shame you for lying, tell them to shut up and study.

The people you’re really going to upset are the ones who have devoted their lives to replacing the family with institutions. You’re going to be going mano a mano with every last activist who thinks “quality child care” is a government duty and the answer for your kids. You’ll be disturbing the plans of welfare reform- ers and deadbeat-dad hunters and all those feeding off the assumption that families can no longer rear their children. This army includes Republicans and Democrats, rich people and working poor. And it includes people who call themselves leaders in your community.

All of those people believe that you are incapable of doing what you have to do. All of those people believe that you cannot function as a man if you are tending to your children instead of working at a job that pays. All of those people think your virility is so fragile that it will snap under the strain of a role that is not directly inherited from hunters. Many of those people think you are the wrong person to be the chief influence in the life of your child. Most of them believe in their hearts that you as an unemployed black American male are a lost cause. None of those people has ever suggested that you constitute the greatest unused resource in the country. They don’t think you can do it.

Is that true? Is it more manly to hang out doing nothing than doing something? Is cash the only measure of your manhood, or does outcome count? If you had a job and your wife had a job, would the house in the suburbs that people hope you will buy give your children something better than the time you could spend with them now, seeing that they don’t grow into brats?

That last one ought to be the clincher for you. Everybody talks about the trouble your kids are in. Maybe you should take a look at the kids who are being raised by day care, video games, TV, and microwave ovens while their parents hump for the payment on a house with too many rooms in a cul de sac far from the ghetto.

Anybody who’s looked closely at those children sees that they are incapable of taking adult roles in a participatory democracy. They know nothing of work, nothing of humor, nothing of joint effort, nothing of sacrifice. Those privileged latchkey kids are lost. And no one’s looking for them. They are no competition for your children. Your kids can beat them easily and go on to take over the country’s machinery. But they have to be immigrants first. You can bring them to America.

Albert Pyle is a writer in Cincinnati.