I doubt it.
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Posted on 05/28/2012 5:10:26 AM PDT by IbJensen
The quickest way to divide people is to have them speak different languages. America has always been a nation of immigrants, but one of the things that has always united us as a nation has been the English language. In the past, it was always understood that if you wanted to thrive in the "land of opportunity" that you had better learn English and learn it well. Unfortunately, times have changed. Today, many radical activist groups are actually referring to the English language as a "tool of oppression"...
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..and are demanding that special accommodations be made for those that do not wish to learn the English language. But what languages are we supposed to accommodate? Overall, there are 325 different languages spoken at home in the United States today. So which of those languages should receive special treatment? How far are we really going to take all of this? Someday, instead of your telephone telling you to "press 1 for English, 2 for Spanish", it may tell you to "press 323 for Italian, 324 for Arabic or 325 for English". Yes, that is kind of a ridiculous example, but we really should examine where all of this is headed. Is America destined to become a multilingual nation where we all struggle to understand one another?
This debate can become very heated. The first thing that both sides should acknowledge is that everyone deserves to be loved and respected no matter where they are from and no matter what the color of their skin is. If someone speaks English that does not make that person better than someone who speaks Spanish and vice versa. Every single person on this planet is extremely valuable no matter where they come from and no matter what language they speak.
And the reality of the matter is that tens of millions of Americans speak Spanish as their primary language today.
All of us have noticed many of the changes that have occurred as a result.
If you use an ATM in America today, you will likely have the option to conduct your business in the Spanish language.
If you call a customer service hotline, you can "press 1 for English" or "para español oprima dos".
In many areas of California, Texas and Florida some employers have made being bilingual a mandatory requirement for many jobs. If you apply for those jobs and you do not speak both English and Spanish you can just forget it.
Down in Miami, there are large areas of the city where Spanish is actually the primary language. It is almost like going to a foreign country.
Big retailers in many parts of the country have also hopped on the bandwagon. The following is a photo sent to me by a reader of the interior of a Home Depot store....
There is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to be helpful to your customers, but are we eventually going to get to the point where almost everything in America is done in two or more languages?
Increasingly, radical activist groups are deciding that it is not right to expect that immigrants will attempt to assimilate into our culture. Instead, they are demanding that all of us must be willing to make special accommodations for them.
This whole "political correctness" thing has totally gotten out of control.
According to Marta Jimenez, a lawyer for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, "the historical use of English in the United States" has been used as "a tool of oppression".
A tool of oppression? Really?
One of the biggest areas where we are seeing this kind of activism is in the education system. In some areas of America today, Hispanic students are taught most of their subjects in Spanish. This makes it very difficult for them to successfully integrate with the larger society.
The consequences of not insisting that public school students become proficient in English have been very dramatic at times. The following example comes from an article by Mauro Mujica....
In May, about 20 percent of the students at Miami Senior High School, where 88 percent of the students speak English as a second language, failed the annual Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) exam, which is required for graduation. The poor results prompted protests and demands for the test to be given in Spanish as well as English. Over 200 students and teachers gathered outside the school waving signs and chanting "No FCAT." A state senator from Miami introduced a bill that would allow the FCAT to be given in Spanish.
Unfortunately, these issues are not going to go away any time soon. Today, approximately 20 percent of the entire population of the state of California is considered to have limited English proficiency.
The federal government certainly has not been helping matters. Illegal immigrants are much less likely to integrate into society, and the federal government continues to do very little to stop the flow of illegal immigrants coming into this country.
Meanwhile, legal immigrants (those that would be more likely to integrate successfully) have to go through paperwork hell in order to do things correctly.
Our entire immigration system is totally upside down.
Much of this article has focused on Spanish so far, but that is far from the only language that is becoming a major issue.
For example, those immigrating from the Middle East are also often not very eager to integrate into our culture.
Thanks to the federal government, very large numbers of Muslims have been immigrating into the United States, and as a result Islam is now the fastest growing major religion in America.
Many communities in America have actually altered their school calendars to accommodate Islamic holidays, and Arabic is commonly spoken in many areas of the United States today.
Someday members of your family may be taught Arabic in school. Don't think that it can't happen. As the New York Post recently reported, one public elementary school in New York will now require students to study Arabic....
An upper Manhattan public elementary school will be the first in the city to require that students study Arabic, officials said yesterday.
Beginning next semester, all 200 second- through fifth-graders at PS 368 in Hamilton Heights will be taught the language twice a week for 45 minutes — putting it on equal footing with science and music courses.
So will we soon hear "press 3 for Arabic" when we call a customer service line?
America is rapidly changing.
Barack Obama issued a memorandum which authorized the admission of up to 80,000 additional immigrants during fiscal year 2011. Most of the additional "refugees" were from areas that were highly Islamic.
As their numbers grow, will they be willing to learn our language and our culture?
Most Americans do not realize this, but there is even a requirement that ballots in other languages be available on a nationwide basis.
So you don't even need to know English in order to be able to vote.
Unfortunately, those alternate ballots cost a lot of money to print up.
According to one estimate, providing bilingual and multilingual voting ballots nationwide costs close to 5 million dollars.
But it isn't just ballots that are the issue.
Executive Order 13166, which was signed by Bill Clinton when he was president, essentially requires that all federal agencies ensure that individuals with limited English proficiency have "meaningful access" to all services that they provide.
That means that millions upon millions of dollars is spent printing up forms and documents in other languages.
A recent CNS News article discussed one example of this....
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the government is working on including more questions about the health concerns of the LGBT community. The National Health Survey questions will be in multiple languages to “drill down on what are the specific health needs around the LGBT community.”
So is the federal government going to print up the National Health Survey in all 325 languages that are spoken in American homes?
If not, why not?
Don't all language groups deserve equal treatment under the law?
Hopefully you are getting an idea of how bizarre all of this can potentially become.
The truth is that if we could focus on just one language that might help our education system.
Today, 47 percent of all people living in the city of Detroit are functionally illiterate. Getting the people of Detroit to be able to use one language correctly would be a major step in the right direction.
And if we allow other languages to become dominant in the United States it is only going to be a matter of time before that creates very deep political divisions in this country.
Theodore Roosevelt once made the following statement....
"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism…. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities."
So what do you think about all of this?
Mexico, along with all of central and south America do not offer options as to whether one wants Spanish or English which makes one wonder why our nation is so damned stupid!
“Press 1 For English...”
“1” is bad enough - I’ve encountered situations where English has been demoted to “2” or even “3” or “4”...
Sadly, though in no hurry for the Good Lord to punch my ticket, I no longer cling to this oft repeated lament.
As someone who served in the USAF (and in Nam for 18 months) and who grew up as most Patriotic Americans did for the past 200 years, I LOVE my Country and always considered it "EXCEPTIONAL" and thought it would ALWAYS be one which led the way and stood athwart to the desires and ambitions of despots and dictators as well as being the most successful "Experiment" in achievement, freedom, ect., ever known to Mankind.
Now, I must admit that I'm glad I won't be around in another 30 - 40 years as the way our Country is (apparently) headed, those of us alive today and around in the mid 21st Century, will probably not recognize it as the United States of America and it might very well turn into just another of the many 3rd World and Socialist Countries which populate the Globe; that is, if we are not by then, an "Islamic Repbulic."
It is assumed America is multi-cultural (actually, multi-cultural means, conclaves within the US that refuse to be American).
I can remember (but not the year ... the '70's ?) the offer to press 1 for English started and I wondered .. wtf? .. who started this and why?
Really ... I had travelled a fair bit (hitching across the US twice, Boston to Cal .. (once the southern route, once the northern) and though I met a LOT of different people, and smoked a lot of dope with them .. I never met anyone that seemed to want their own different identity via language.
I think this whole 'press 1 for English' shit was one of those great marketing coups that are up there with the subliminal blowjob Coke ads ... Madison Ave just laughing their collective asses off.
I doubt it.
The end result of this is a bifuraction of this country with the Spanish speakers at a marked disadvantage and with new reasons for anger: their children will not be assimilated fully and will not be capable of full technical English for advanced education and the higher-paying jobs.
It's resisting the tide, I guess but I almost never buy products with parallel language labelling, I complain to parent companies about Spanish-language advertising (I once got MacDonalds to remove a billboard advertising in Spanish in my neighborhood), and I refuse to answer anyone in Spanish when addressed in that language.
e pluribus unum with an emphasis on "unum". That unifier is language and we have to resist all these attempts to divide this country through language.
I think that there are a few states that we ENGLISH speaking American Patriots need divorcing from.
LLS
Also, Michael Savage has been harping on this for years: "Borders, Language, Culture".
Also Pat Buchanan. But, he's hated because people have been convinced he's anti-Semitic.
But, 22 years ago this was written. Now it's all coming true but still the majority of American cower at the thought of being called racist.
The Path to National Suicide by Lawrence Auster (1990)
An essay on multi-culturalism and immigration.
Excerpt....
How can we account for this remarkable silence? The answer, as I will try to show, is that when the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 was being considered in Congress, the demographic impact of the bill was misunderstood and downplayed by its sponsors. As a result, the subject of population change was never seriously examined. The lawmakers’ stated intention was that the Act should not radically transform America’s ethnic character; indeed, it was taken for granted by liberals such as Robert Kennedy that it was in the nation’s interest to avoid such a change. But the dramatic ethnic transformation that has actually occurred as a result of the 1965 Act has insensibly led to acceptance of that transformation in the form of a new, multicultural vision of American society. Dominating the media and the schools, ritualistically echoed by every politician, enforced in every public institution, this orthodoxy now forbids public criticism of the new path the country has taken. “We are a nation of immigrants,” we tell ourselves— and the subject is closed. The consequences of this code of silence are bizarre. One can listen to statesmen and philosophers agonize over the multitudinous causes of our decline, and not hear a single word about the massive immigration from the Third World and the resulting social divisions. Opponents of population growth, whose crusade began in the 1960s out of a concern about the growth rate among resident Americans and its effects on the environment and the quality of life, now studiously ignore the question of immigration, which accounts for fully half of our population growth.
This curious inhibition stems, of course, from a paralyzing fear of the charge of “racism.” The very manner in which the issue is framed—as a matter of equal rights and the blessings of diversity on one side, versus “racism” on the other—tends to cut off all rational discourse on the subject. One can only wonder what would happen if the proponents of open immigration allowed the issue to be discussed, not as a moralistic dichotomy, but in terms of its real consequences. Instead of saying: “We believe in the equal and unlimited right of all people to immigrate to the U.S. and enrich our land with their diversity,” what if they said: “We believe in an immigration policy which must result in a staggering increase in our population, a revolution in our culture and way of life, and the gradual submergence of our current population by Hispanic and Caribbean and Asian peoples.” Such frankness would open up an honest debate between those who favor a radical change in America’s ethnic and cultural identity and those who think this nation should preserve its way of life and its predominant, European-American character. That is the actual choice—as distinct from the theoretical choice between “equality” and “racism”—that our nation faces. But the tyranny of silence has prevented the American people from freely making that choice.
It makes me very mad to see all the signs in Spanish, to read about school district where whole classes are taught in Spanish... How are those people going to learn? We are not doing them any favor when we "make it easy" for them. But I reserve my biggest outrage for the idea that a person can request to take the naturalization exam in his or her language! I thought that speaking English was one of the requirements for naturalization (it is, really) so why would people take the exam in a different language?
When God wanted to destroy a civilization, He confused their languages. It worked at Babel, why should we expect anything different in America?
Today we have immigrants who are happy to come here to escape the dung hole countries where they live, get ample government benefits in doing so, but with the help of the PC crowd have no incentive to learn the English language or even to see themselves as Americans. They want all the benefits of living in America, but want to live under the cultures where they came from and then complain when American ideas like freedom of religion and religious tolerance conflict with their third world mindset. I am especially irked when I see women and young girls covered head to foot dutifully following behind men dressed in western clothing chattering in their own tongue in shopping malls like it was a bazaar in some third world dung hole, paying for their food with EBT and complaining that they NEED special treatment in their jobs, schools etc. not given to anyone else just because of THEIR beliefs. Visiting Minneapolis (a.k.a New Mogadishu)is becoming like going to a third world country.
Where I live, signs are very often in Spanish only. They don’t even bother with an English translation underneath. Songs and announcements over stores’ PA systems are in Spanish. I get junk mail, phone recordings and sometimes even bills in Spanish. People come up to me in public and start jabbering away in Spanish, assuming that of course I speak it, and acting put out when I tell them I don’t. You can’t channel surf or turn the dial on the radio without coming across one Spanish-language station after another, after another. And on and on.
No, we are not going to be a bilingual nation. We are going to be a SPANISH-SPEAKING nation.
Think it’s annoying to “Press 1 for English”? Just wait. As California goes, so goes the nation.
The same at the Atlanta airport.
Lots of foreigner tourists but lots more of new immigrants trying to learn English.
And then there is that totally foreign Southern Negro-Cajun language that is totally incomprehensible.
“Press 1 For English: Is America Destined To Become A Multilingual Nation?”
I think it’s a little late to be asking that.
More appropriate questions:
How much longer will America -exist- as a multilingual nation?
And what comes afterwards?
“I, for one, shudder when I hear a DemocRAT or a RepublicRAT speak of the strength of our nation being a result of our ‘diversity.’”
It is completely illogical. Since when do you make anything stronger by dividing it?
However, I DO get my back up when I go to Lowes or Home Depot, and on one occasion, Wal-Mart, and see Spanish signs on the aisles. Border cities I can see, but 400 miles inland is something else.
I used to be a night stocker at W-M and always made a point to load boxes of merchandise, usually kitchenware, with the English version facing outward. One night I was rearranging the boxes when a supervisor asked why I was messing with stuff already on the shelves. I told him that a Hispanic guy asked me why W-M thought they were too stupid to learn English and had boxes placed so that Spanish was visible.
The supervisor asked me what I told the customer. I said that W-M was no different from other corporations who catered to the Hispanics as they would sell their daughters or heritage if it meant increasing the bottom line. I got a deer-in-headlight look, and thought sure I would be canned (no loss, it was a beer-money job as I was retired), but he never bothered me again. I liked to think that maybe I opened his eyes, but he was a Lifer, so you never know.
No, there are millions of parasites on this planet who have no intention of ever doing a useful day's work as long as they live.
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