Yeah. Exactly.
The first time Rep. Tom Tancredo got really angry about immigration, the year was 1975, and he was a junior high school social studies teacher in Denver. The state had recently passed the nation’s first bilingual education law, and Hispanic kids were taken from his class to study in Spanish.
That idea made zero sense to Tancredo, the grandson of Italian immigrants. He believed that newcomers should be assimilated into the country, as they had for generations. The image of America as a beacon for people from all over the world uniting under one flag and one language was threatened, he contended, if the country started adapting to immigrants, instead of the other way around.
This is THE spot on the face of the earth people head for, people dream about. It needs to stay that way. Join us and go forth from here as Americans.
We are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically now. We are assimilating them culturally. Within a generation their children speak Valley Girl on cell phones. “So I’m like ‘no,” and he’s all ‘yeah,’ and I’m like, ‘In your dreams.’ ” Whether their parents are from Trinidad, Bosnia, Lebanon or Chile, their children, once Americans, know the same music, the same references, watch the same shows. And to a degree and in a way it will hold them together. But not forever and not in a crunch.
So far we are assimilating our immigrants economically, too. They come here and work. Good.
But we are not communicating love of country. We are not giving them the great legend of our country. We are losing that great legend.
What is the legend, the myth? That God made this a special place. That they’re joining something special.
Oh yeah. He did.
More facts ‘n figures reading via our good friend, the Gateway Pundit.
Life | tree hugging sister | 
March 30, 2006 11:32 pm
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God didn’t make it special. Good men and women made it special. No deity required. Washington and Mason and Randolph and the rest of the gang. They did it. Unique men with morality, eithics, intelligence, and intestinal fortitude.
If a god could have done it, it would have happened earlier.
(Oh, you are such a poophead. Were you sitting there waiting, knowing I was getting ready to diety post? And here it’s so damn late, I thought I could slip it by you.)
At least, darlin’ Mike, we’re all agreed it’s S P E C I A L.
Makes me think about that part of the Bill Moyers documentary “The Chinese in America” where he goes on about the Exclusion Act. Yes, a lot of it was motivated by racism, but when you look at how incapable the Chinese coolies were of assimilating into a Western democracy, some sort of immigration limits made sense.
I was once interviewed for a job by a German guy who told me he was American through and through, even his outlook before he emigrated was American. My wife disagreed. She thinks that her early schooling in Taiwan conditioned her in subconscious ways, and that she’ll never truly be 100% American (she’s been here for over 20 years). She’ll be forever caught between two cultures.
We have to be careful about letting the gates open too wide, because it takes decades to absorb the civic culture, especially for people emigrating from countries with despotic regimes. Giving our schools over to the idiots from the Schools of Ed has weakened our civic education to our peril.
B-b-b-but we have to be nice and understanding!
Not.
God made this a special place THROUGH men like Franklin, Washinton, Hamilton, Adams, etc.
Good grief! I was wondering who would be the first atheist to have a issue with it. Odd Mike that even our Framers thought the same thing.
Does the phrase:
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,…
Seems the folks who got the whole thing started thought the Big Guy had a bit of involvment in it.
Crusader – I think that that language was a sop to the masses, given the Deism (and athiesm) of Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, et al. It was also to keep shouts of “blasphemy” from being added to charges of “treason”.
I think the Treaty of Tripoli pretty much covers the Founders’ position on this. That’s not to say that faith wasn’t important to the founding of the US, but the Fathers themselves were a mixed lot on the issue.
The Tripoli bit I’m not familiar with John, but I think you’re right about the…fluid nature, shall we say, of many of the Founder’s beliefs.
Mr. B – Here’s the wording of the relevant passage, as accepted by the Senate in 1796:
“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”
“Peace Be Upon Them”
hehehe.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not a part of any “civic culture.”
I drive a Porsche.
Yeah, I fight da’ man too, Mike!
I have a minivan.
Franklin was a Diest, and Jefferson was , well, Jefferson, but Washington was a Christian, and I could supply sufficient quotes/accounts to prove it, if needed.
As for the oft repeated Treaty of Tripoli canard, here is a good breakdown of it.
And I am an Accord, Eclipse and 525i man myself.
A pox upon minivans.
There is nothing epoxy about my minivan!
And I have recently become a Toyota Camry man in addition to the m-van.
Crusader –
Article 11 appeared and disappeared in various verions of the treaty – probably because of sloppy translations / transcriptions, as well as because of disagreeements over its content – but it was published in newpapers of the day and caused no uproar.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/archive/boston_tripoli.html
But John, the point is, as the article I posted relates, that what is in the Treaty, and what i stated above, are not mutually exclusive; even ole Ben Franklin said that their was divine intervention on this nations behalf, and I could add quotes from many others who signed /wrote our founding documents. Not to mention that the context in which the Treaty was written, and the context of the oft quoted phrase within the Article 11, imply that this was added to calm the Pirates that we were not a theocracy or governed by religion like they were. But it does nothing to discredit any of the things I wrote earlier.