Posted on 04/29/2002 10:50:37 AM PDT by vannrox
It's not a coincidence that South American officials are some of the most corrupt in the world (of course, being that they are politicians....that's not saying much)
Are you really a de-barred attorney with eight marijuana convictions?
Quite a credential for an expert on corruption.
My ultra-liberal sister lives in the wine country of Kalifornia and there are lots of migrant workers whose kids go to school up there. She thought having my nephew in a bi-lingual class would help him learn Spanish when he first started school. She said that at the end of the year, the spanish-speaking kids spoke only spanish and hung out together and the english-speaking kids spoke only english and hung out together. Each group learned little, if any, of the other language.
Seems to me that learning the language of the country you're living in will be a huge advantage to these kids. When my son was in kindergarten, a little boy came from Japan in January and spoke no english at all. At the end of the school year, he spoke perfect english with no accent and played with all the kids.
This year my son is in 3rd grade and a little girl from Japan started the year not speaking any english. The japanese boy from his kndergarten class has been helping her and she now speaks perfect english with no accent.
If I had smuggled myself and my kids into Mexico City, and they didn't speak Spanish, I would probably be very afraid that the Mexican police would catch and deport us !
... or deport them and jail me !
I would defend the rights of anyone who chooses to use substances in their own homes.
No favors are done for Spanish speakers by keeping them in Spanish only classes. They can learn English easily and quickly by "total immersion". Likewise, they can be a benefit for English only speakers who are immersed in Spanish classes. There is lemonade to be made here.
I doubt you will find any serious scholar or person who would dispute the fact that corruption, especially petty corruption in everyday life, is endemic in Latin America, part of the woof and warp of the culture. It is not endemic in North America above the Rio Grande, nor is it endemic in Scandanavia, the British Isles, the Low Countries, German or Switzerland, and perhaps France and Austria. Japan is not corrupt. Italy and Spain are notoriously corrupt, as are the Balkan countries. Indeed, once you leave my short list of countries, corruption is more the rule than the exception.
They have learned well from their North American cousins ;-)
In our Greenwich, Connecticut schools we have had many Japanese kids as well as some Hispanics. The Japanese kids almost all learn English within a year, and many of them integrate very well. The ones here for high school do well and most have as many American friends as Japanese. They move in what one might describe as 'normal' student circles: not the most elite or athletic cliques, but not as loners or outcasts. The Hispanics tend to have difficulty in school, with English and generally, and to limit their social integration to groups known locally as "ghetto," primarily black and hispanic kids (and white gangsta wannabes) who engage in socially unacceptable behaviors concerning drugs, sex, dress, smoking, scholastic achievement (or lack thereof), etc.
I pointedly left Eastern Europe and Russia off my list, as they are rather corrupt societies.
While I agree with you about the corrupting effects of socialism on the soul and the body politic, my experience has been an almost total absense of personal corruption in Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Although few of them are believing Lutherans anymore, the personal rectititude of the Protestant ethic still seems pervasive.
An attorney with eight strikes of a relatively simple type does not convey to me a strong posture of conforming to the bahavior standards of that community.
If ya' don't like the rules, don't raise your right hand taking allegiance, and then go out and break 'em, often. If you wanna' do your own thing, cool, but I don't have much respect for talking one way and walking another.
If that fits your ad hominem, so be it. If my assessment of the lawyer's background is accurate, I still question his standards of measuring ethics.
On your geographic examples, I've traveled enough to think that none of your groupings are monolithic. Exceptions at all extremes, very flat bell-curves.
Personally, I've got business partners, family friends, three generations, spread over much of northern Mexico. The mutual trust is monumental.
To me "endemic" etc. is not a basis for a group generalization. Opining a trait as endemic is not the same as ascribing a trait to the entire generalized group.
IMHO
Actually you can trace it back to the Spanish. Spain did quite a bit of damage as it cut it's colonial swath through South, Central and North America.
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