I totally agree. We are experiencing a backlash now against the slow, pervasive, but hitherto almost unnoticed entrance of Mexican influence into our culture. One of the most irritating things to many of us is so much stuff being in Spanish now.
When I call a private company and I get a 'for English press one' message, I'm, like, okay -- you're a private company, you have a lot of Mexican customers you have to deal with.
But when I call a government agency and get the same thing, it ticks me off. Petty? maybe. But a lot of people are feeling that way and there will be a backlash against it.
Like last year's backlash against substituting Holiday Season for Christmas.
Illegal immigration was and should have been a winning issue for the Reps. Our position reflected the opinion of the majority of Americans. Bush undercut the Reps. If Bush had supported the House position and the majority of Reps in the Senate, it could have become the major issue of the 2006 campaign, especially if it were linked to national security.
I agree and I disagree at the same time. I don't want our government to go too far as I'm afraid that it will lead to Spanish (or Chinese or some other language) being required instead of English. However, I understand the inclination to be inclusive. My heritage is Scots/German. My forebears had been invaded and conquered (or did the invading and conquering) so many times they had lost count. They survived and they adopted the things from each culture that suited them, if it worked and that made sense. We have always thrived by taking in and adopting the best of the peoples from wherever. I wish to continue that tradition. If it works. If it makes sense.
You know that old song "We Are The World?" Well, guess what, we are the world here in America. Unlike anywhere else we are a country made up of people from virtually every other place and culture on the planet. We've gotten where we are by finding what was good in each of those cultures and peoples and incorporating them into who we were. What we can't let happen is allow the PC crowd to balkanize us and put us into competing camps. We must call out the folks from La Raza and La Reconquista and call them what they are, racist invaders. But we must also make the point that we don't see all Mexicans (even illegals) that way, so long as they want to be Americans, not simply Mexicans who happen to live here. or worse, people here to reclaim "their land."
Our compatriots in Great Britain are faced with much the same question as we are because of their former status as an empire. They have magnanimously allowed people from their former colonies to immigrate to the British isles and settle in. Unfortunately it appears that they have not been successful in making many of those people, primarily the Muslims, part of their culture but instead they have allowed them to remain separate and, it appears, hostile. We are in the same danger primarily from the illegal Hispanic populations who have been crossing our southern border unimpeded, but also from seperatist Muslim enclaves that we have allowed to flourish here, such as John Conyers district. President Bush has tried to bring those people into our culture and our society, but like his attempt to forestall a full scale world war with the Islamic fundamentalists I'm afraid he has failed.
I lament that we have probably one of the most illiterate general populations about the languages and cultures that have made up this polyglot that is America. We are no longer taught about the Anglo Saxon heritage of our "founding fathers" (those evil dead white men), but we also aren't taught true stories about all of the other people that have made up our culture. All of them are presented as victims of the white man, not vital contributors to the greater whole that is us. I claim Nikola Tesla and George Washington Carver as my own countrymen. I also claim Jim Thorpe, Sitting Bull, Buffalo Bill Cody, Jim Bridger and Sacajawea, along with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X (after he broke with the Nation of Islam over their insane racism, for which Calypso Louis arranged his murder). I admire Jeb Bush and his wife, whom he met in her home town in Mexico, and hope someday to vote for George P. Bush, their bilingual Hispanic son, for some high office, maybe even President (45 or 46?). I see lots to admire in all of the people and cultures that make up our nation, not instead of white Anglo Saxon protestants, but in addition to that legacy. I regret that I don't speak any other languages and would hope that we get more educated in that area as it will only help us all to do better.
And did you know that the "North American Union" of Mexico, the US and Canada that so many are complaining about now was one of Ronald Reagan's long term goals? He saw our nations coming together under the principles that had made the US great and expanding our greatness, not surrendering it to "alien invaders." Mexico could and should be a wealthy nation with a large prosperous middle class and virtually no underclass. They would be if they lived under our system and laws and not the corrupt oligarchy that has been allowed to flourish there for far too long. What we have to guard against is that we export our system to them and not the other way around. This election is a step in the wrong direction for that goal.
My father was raised in the deep south and I am named for his father who was county sheriff in the middle of the depression in one of the most notorious counties in Mississippi. He served only one term as sheriff because "he had no truck with the Klan," as he put it. It's said that he's the only sheriff in Mississippi history who came out of office poorer than he went in, but that's because he wouldn't turn anybody down who needed help, white, black, Indian or whatever. I'm proud of that heritage. My mother was born on and raised on Indian reservations throughout this country because her father was with the BIA. He was the kind of Indian agent they didn't show in the movies, though. He stood up to the government when they tried to send condemned beef rejected by the Army to feed the Indians. He didn't have one of the greatest careers in that bureaucracy, either. But he also homesteaded in the Wind River area of Wyoming and helped found the town of Riverton. I am very proud of my Scots/German heritage from both of my parents families. My wife has similar heritage and therefore my children do too. But I have insisted on impressing on our children that they should understand and learn from as many cultures as they can and take from the those things that are good and reject those things that are not. That is what I am most proud of about my kids. They got that lesson right (at least so far).