Posted on 05/28/2009 1:22:55 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Do you remember when you were younger and every once in a while you’d hear about this old miser that lived out by himself on some large plot of land? They were usually described as anti-social people who didn’t want to be bothered by other people.
Frankly, those folks are looking pretty damned smart these days. I like to experience social situations, so I couldn’t do it, but there are times when I think I could live that lifestyle quite comfortably.
I hear you Doughty, sadly our children and grand children will suffer our incompetence. I cry for the last bastion of freedom, the light of the world, slowly but surely flaming out.
No wonder the U.S. is no where to be found in Bible Prophecy, we won't even be relevant by then.
Immigrants and minority voters vote Democrat, in large part (and I know this because they’ve told me) because of the sort of blanket anti-minority and anti-immigrant sentiments that one can see expressed here and other right-wing web sites, on some right-wing talk radio stations, and by some right-wing politicians. Having Jesse Helms sing “Dixie” to Carol Moseley-Braun, for example, is the sort of thing that costs Republicans minority votes, no matter how much I disliked Moseley-Braun or how reliably conservative Helms was and it also cements the image of southern whites and things like the Confederate flag as inherently racist in the minds of minorities. A lot of minorities and immigrants are socially conservative and even fully conservative and I have black friends who vote Republican. But if we want larger numbers, we’ve got to knock off letting the snide and bigoted remarks pass as normal discourse on the right.
Well, a lot of Hispanics are also European. Two people who lived in my dorm in college were Puerto Ricans with incredibly blonde hair and blue eyes and a lot of Hispanics think of themselves as "white". That's why race questionaires often go out of their way to get Hispanic people to identify as Hispanic and not white and also why they don't seem interested in recording mixed races.
The reality is that a lot of "white" people also have traces of American Indian and other races and ethnicities in them and if you family is from Southern Italy or Sicily, it's quite likely that there are some Arabs and even North Africans in your distant family tree. Sarah Palin's husband and children are mixed race, too.
It may have in that area. There was a lot of illegal immigration in the 90s, and California was getting about two thirds of those people, if not more.
Since then it has spread out, and it’s causing problems across the nation now.
I like to watch Bonanza sometimes and often wonder what it would have been like to live in those days...otoh, there's a lot to be said about the amenities of life today though.
I guess we'll have to take it as it is and as it comes.
Heck, even living here in Vegas, I rarely go out. I could handle living on some property that wasn't too far out of the way
I believe that the United States, despite it’s faults, was the last bastion of reasoned governance on the face of planet earth. So although it isn’t mentioned in Bible prophecy, I do believe Bible prophecy will closely follow the demise of the United States.
It should be noted though, that somewhere in the Bible, perhaps in Revelation it describes a new land with Bison in the context. There are people who believe that new land was the United States.
Once the U.S. is hobbled, there well be a dark time on this planet like none we’ve ever seen. This isn’t going to be regional. It’s going to be a global problem that will not stabilize like past global wars have. There will be no sane government left to foster freedom and individual rights. All bets are off then.
And being a global situation with people everywhere able to see it, I think it will be a time of reckoning.
Look, who knows? I can only surmise like others.
That's not what a lot of early white Americans thought. After all, the Irish, like the Italians and Poles, are Catholic and religion used to matter a lot more then than it does now, too. You should look at political cartoons from the 1800s and how Catholics were depicted. My father and mother almost didn't get married because my father refused to promise to raise me Catholic and my great grandparents on my father's side are burried in seperate cemetaries despite having 12 children together because one was Catholic and the other Protestant. If you look at the draft riots in New York City during the Civil War (the racial aspects glossed over in Gangs of New York), the reason why the Irish immigrants targeted blacks (including setting fire to a black orphanage) is that they saw the blacks as competition because the Irish were widely considered lower on the social scale than the blacks were.
I do understand the point you are trying to make but you should take a serious look look at how the Irish were perceived at the time and why, nor should you ignore the Anglicization of Ireland and how that happened.
Wow, that’s a lot of future payroll taxes the US Treasury can collect from employers. If the employee doesn’t give a true SSN, the government can keep the money...
Pretty good scam the govt is running. I’m not sure if offering them free healthcare in the emergencies is worth it, though
I think of Randy, yes. I also think of the Branch Dividians, a quack group if ever there was one, but living well within their rights to be quacks if they so desired.
They didn’t set out to attack the government or anyone else. Instead the government swooped down on them and the rest is history.
I am still just dumbfounded to realize that not one single official was prosecuted for either of these cases, and in fact a number of them got commendations and or promotions.
I haven’t watched Bonanza in years, but I do know what you mean, living in a time when things moved a lot slower, and a lot more reasoned.
There are still people speaking a century old dialect of Italian that nobody speaks in Italy any more on Statin Island in New York and they do have Italian newspapers and so on. Yes, my father knew immigrant families where the kids would get hit for not speaking English at home because the parents wanted them to learn English but there were also ethnic enclaves that still exist. The kids can’t help but being exposed to English if they look at the other four hundred channels on their cable box.
My mother is an Italian immigrant who only speaks Italian to her children and her grand children primarily so that they can have meaningful relationships with their Italian cousins. So, I know at least a little of what I speak.
And yes, there are still pockets, very very small pockets of population in the States that speak Italian as a primary language, maybe even sole language. But, the scale today or even in 1920 pales in comparison to what's going on in America's Latino barrios. Nor was Italian, or any other non-English language for that matter, spoken with such ubiquity across the country.
You say that children can't help but learn English, but that's clearly not the case in today's reality. Second generation Latino children are years behind their non-Latino counterparts because the bulk of their primary education is spent learning English as it's not spoken at home or in the neighborhood - it's a deficit from which they never recover and is one of, if not the reason that Latino children have such high drop out rates relative to the general population.
The failure of immigrant populations to assimilate is not a uniquely American phenomenon. It can be seen in other countries and the results are almost always the same - friction, isolation, frustration and resentment - which all lead to significant social problems for both the immigrants and their hosts.
Without reading that, I see that the latino birth rate here is way up, as the percentiles have risen from the 9% of the births in America to the to the 20% range.
Unless there are far more latino women here than white, - and there are not - then this is dispositive to that information, ispo facto.
Big assumption. Mexico is a corrupt, poverty ridden, third world country. The idea that they will be able to duplicate the opportunity, benefits, and lifestyle of the US is a pipe dream. Have you ever been there?
The US culture as we know it is on its way out and the country will be converted to a muslim state if we restrict the inflow of latin Americans. That’s certain. See video report at: http://www.nmatv.com/video/2258/Muslim-Demographics
Sorry, America shouldn't be based on either racism OR religious bias.
You surmise wisely DoughtyOne.
The United States surely will be marginalized, but still be here, just powerless to intervene in what will come soon.
When we see all these things happen, look up, for your redemption draweth nigh.
I am a little older than you and was raised in Oklahoma. I was in grade school during WW II, so I remember being very poor, but we were thankful and happy. Or maybe just blissfully ignorant. I would gladly give up all of today to relive those times, well, except I would like to keep air conditioning.
I suggest you read your history. Long before there was a Jesse Helms or a right wing web site, immigrants voted Dem or socialist. Much of it has to do with how the immigrants viewed the role of government whether they were Irish or Jews from Eastern Europe or Italians.
The Democrats offer immigrants services and benefits from a paternalistic government, something many of the immigrants experienced in their home countries. The same applies to today's immigrants. They are in favor of universal health care, national pensions, and big government.
A lot of minorities and immigrants are socially conservative and even fully conservative and I have black friends who vote Republican. But if we want larger numbers, we’ve got to knock off letting the snide and bigoted remarks pass as normal discourse on the right.
I can only speak for myself. What have I said that was snide or bigoted? As for this mythical assumption that many minorities are socially conservative, the facts say otherwise. The out of wedlock birthrates for Hispanics is 50% topped only by the black rate of 68%.
I also dispute your generalization that snide and bigoted remarks are part of the normal discourse on the right. This is the Dem caricature.
Thank you.
I grew up 4.5 miles outside the large metropolis of Diamond, Missouri, on a 120 acre farm. Our nearest neighbors were a mile away. Diamond’s population was about 453 people. It was about 10 miles South East of Joplin.
We didn’t have air conditioning either, but a fan really worked well with the humidity.
It’s been a long time, but I’ve been over into Oklahoma a bit, the Eastern part mostly with one trip over to Enid.
You know, when I was a kid, I used to play with bricks, and make believe they were cars. I used to strip poke greens and play sword fight with my brother, mostly just before fighting. LOL I used to hit rocks with sticks, bounce a ball off steps by the hour in make believe nine inning baseball games with all my favorite players. There’s always fun things to do if you’re creative.
You don’t have to be rich to be happy. You don’t have to have things to be happy. You don’t even have to have others to be happy. You have to decide to be happy to be happy.
I could give up air conditioning. My wife couldn’t. She’d wilt.
Bias??? - You leftists drive me crazy! - America is what it is, and that isn't bias, its history.
Our foundation, and our culture is Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Christian, and to deny that is ignorant bias.
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