I grew up in WASPy coal mining town that was overrun in the early 1900s by Irish and Eastern European Catholics, because the WASPs needed (essentially) slaves to work in the mines. No one got along. In one little town you’d have an Irish church, a Slovak church, a Polish church, a Russian church. The Russians celebrated Christmas and New Years on different dates from everyone else, and so they were suspect about everything. Everyone had rifles and shotguns because everyone hunted. Anyway, I was born about 30 years after my grandparents came here and we were already assimilated. My grandparents still spoke the old language, but their kids (my parents’ generation) all spoke English without accents. Old religious traditions were kept in the homes. No one stuck their religious quirks in anyone else’s faces (not by the 1950s anyway). Everyone had disrespectful, funny names for everyone else — the Protestants were the proddy dogs, the Catholics were the mackeral snappers, the Jews were the Jukies. But no one walked around in European peasant garb spoiling for a fight. There was subtle pressure from the oldsters against intermarriage, even into the 1970s, but it wasn’t unbearable. By the 1970s we were all drinking and scr@wing in the woods together. So I guess my point is... to my eye, in my little town, it took about 60 or 70 years for everyone to forget where they came from and what religion everybody belonged to. And now with my kids, born in the 80s and 90s, there is no awareness of anyone’s background. So whatever. It’s all just a load of crap anyway.
There, you've put your finger on the crucial difference between then, in the America of yesteryear, and now, in the "salad bowl" (as opposed to "melting pot") of today. There is a decided lack of assimilation on the part of new immigrants - at least, on the part of those from certain cultures. That's why I'm not so sanguine about the prospects of everybody "just getting along" in 60 or 70 years.
Regards,
Your experience was between Judeo-Christian religions, which all have a very similar framework.
Islam is something else. I don’t think the melting pot you describe happens with them.
“I guess my point is... to my eye, in my little town, it took about 60 or 70 years for everyone to forget where they came from and what religion everybody belonged to. And now with my kids, born in the 80s and 90s, there is no awareness of anyone’s background. So whatever. It’s all just a load of crap anyway.”
Your observations are good ones insofar as the history of your forbears are concerned.
There’s one problem, however.
Muslims DON’T intermix, they DON’T “forget where they came from”, and they DON’T forget which religion they belong to.
What’s to be done about that?
And now with my kids, born in the 80s and 90s, there is no awareness of anyone’s background. So whatever.
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Unfortunately, children born after yours are being subjected to serious indoctrination in schools in hopes of resuming this kind of fracturing of a populace. “Diversity” “awareness” is the tool being used.