Overloading the melting pot: Linda Bowles examines impact of cultural divisions on U.S. citizens

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Tuesday, December 18, 2001 | Linda Bowles

[JohnHuang2]

When Islamic fundamentalists declared war on the United States, it had the effect of rallying America to God and country. It also had the effect of flushing out deep flaws and divisions throughout our nation that have been too long ignored and too often not only tolerated, but reinforced.

While America has a generous supply of enemies throughout the world, the most dangerous threat to our integrity as a nation lies within ourselves and our institutions. In a brilliant essay written earlier this year, Diane Alden agrees with historian and social critic Gertrude Himmelfarb that in our major institutions of learning, there no longer exists a canon, a central body of thought particular to the American or Western experience.

Alden drives directly to the point: "It is reasonable to conclude that we may no longer have an 'American' culture but instead a hyphenated, divided and broken America ... When Western academe does not offer a focus or support courses for the basics of Western culture, we are setting ourselves up to become a balkanized Yugoslavia."

America was conceived and built by religious white men, mostly from Europe. Blacks, women and others made contributions, but they were secondary. The Constitution was written by white men, steeped in European philosophy, literature and political science.

However, if you say any of that out loud on a college campus, you will be labeled a racist and a sexist, and sent to sensitivity training and taught that our strength is our diversity. You will be told to stop saying things that offend others – unless, of course, the others are white, heterosexual males or Christians.

In an essay in USA Today, Don Campbell, a lecturer in journalism at Emory University, conceded that when the American Council of Trustees and Alumni "says campuses have been kidnapped by the political correctness crowd, it has a point. A college campus is one of the last places to find freedom of speech, and has been for many years ... and when ACTA says that colleges are abandoning core liberal arts courses, especially American history, it is absolutely right."

Study after study confirms that most of our high school and college graduates are genuinely ignorant of American history, the Constitution, capitalism and the philosophic and religious values that inspired our founding fathers. We are systematically abandoning our heritage as a great nation and are teetering on the threshold of losing our national identity.

Ethnic diversity is a double-edged sword. It can be a fatal weakness that divides a country into warring factions, or it can be a strength if there are transcendent and unifying values, a common language, a cohesive culture, a shared tradition and a sense of loyalty and allegiance to the same nationality. Diverse people can then organize themselves around and make unique contributions to the whole.

Without debate or even acknowledging it, we have abandoned the idea of the "melting pot," not only for all those who currently live in the United States but for immigrants as well.

President Woodrow Wilson said this to immigrants: "And while you bring all countries with you, you come with the purpose of leaving all other countries behind you – bringing what is best of their spirit, but not looking over your shoulders and seeking to perpetuate what you intended to leave behind in them." The current message to immigrants might as well be this: "Come as you are, and stay as you are."

According to a report in Human Events, there are 44.9 million Americans who do not speak English in their homes. This is more than the population of the nation of Spain. Human Events asks the question, "Has the melting pot been overloaded and broken by a combination of massive immigration and a multicultural ideology in the nation's public schools?"

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., answers in the affirmative: "There are too many coming in too quickly," he said. "And with multiculturalism and bilingual education in schools, it's not a melting pot mentality. It's a Bosnia mentality. In the school system, we encourage people to disconnect from America and to think of themselves as separate."

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, agrees that "there is a great emphasis on multiculturalism, which encourages separate identities." Children are taught that it is wrong to believe that one culture is better than any other culture, or that one morality is better than any other morality – which is hardly a firm foundation for a belief in God and country.

This hardly resonates with the words of the celebrated author James Baldwin: "The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land."

[JohnHuang2]

Quote of the Day by Dog Gone

[Captainpaintball]

21-paintball gun salute BUMP!

[SAJ]

If American culture were not superior to your culture, Mr. or Miss Immigrant, then why did you come here?

"For the economic advantages, and better jobs.", you say?

Ah. Well, those are produced by a superior culture. Is there any part of that you don't understand, Mr. or Miss Immigrant...aside from ALL of it, of course.

[JSteff]

Exactly right and reason for a number of things including: law of english as the national language, stricter citizenship requirements - including tougher classes and testing for wannabes, and tighter immigration laws and enforcement.

The last thing we need is to become like the balkans and end up in 50 years with the U.N. on a "peace keeping" mission here. It would never end.

Oh and that brings up another thing.... get out of the U.N. and let them move to Switzerland or Argentina or anywhere but on this continent.

[meenie]

The perfect solution would be if the incoming immigrants came here and dissolved into and accepted our culture. This isn't the reality, though. If you accept third world immigrants in large numbers, then society will change to accommodate their culture.

Sad to say, you can see this happening now. English is becoming a secondary language in a lot of areas. We see the attitudes regarding freedom of expression and regard of the rule of law drifting more to the attitudes of banana republics.

This a result of the excessive immigration we have had in the past few years and the politicians trying to pander to their constituency.

[Charliehorse]

I teach English as a Second Language class in a free program at our church in Texas. There are over 160 enrolled in the program with 60+ in attendance each Wednesday night for 1 1/2 hours. They are wonderful people who are trying to get ahead. They all work and all but one are married with a family.

One of these students taught herself enough english to obtain her citizenship (we ask no questions). She works in a hat factory making men's hats. Her husband works as a delivery and pickup man for a local manufacturer. They have three sons who speak perfect english. One son is in an academy, who teach the brightest students in the school district. They have a very nice home with a pickup and late model car. They are smart and are Americans, but they speak Spanish in their home.

Another example is a young 19 year old young Hispanic whose mother is in one of our classes. The young Hispanic volunteered to teach a class because she brought her mother and stayed through the class to take her mother home. She now has the largest and argueably the best class. The young woman is sweating out whether she will make 4 A's and 1 B or 3 A's and 2 B's in her first semester in college. She is computer, internet, and Office 2000 savvy. She has 4 years of restaurant and office experience. She will go far in this world, but she doesn't know it yet.

I believe that most immigrants will assimilate by the second generation as illustrated above. The few elites in the Universities may never assimilate because of their brainwashing at the schools. The elites will have little impact on the vast majority of immigrants who will be the savior of your children's social security and retirement. Your great grandchildren may be a shade darker. They will still be wonderful.

[norton]

I don't know what part of Texas you're from Charlie but you might want to check out southern California for the other side of that coin.
Our side will never get this part of the state back, the only defense so far against reconquesta has been the high numbers of Cambodians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Etc. that also came here.
The problem then becomes one of dissimilar gains by the different newbies - mexicans remaining in the van.
Black population is declining and not at all happy with it either.

Balkans.

[Taxman]

Excellent article -- a must read, must understand essay.

[Uncle Bill]

"The modern American university is the most totalitarian and elitist institution in the world. Students who show up on campus loving their country face a monolithic, repressive environment. Professors are undemocratically chosen by other, like-minded professors and tenure is distributed based solely on the willingness of the scholar to adopt the anti-American theology of the ruling elites. This authoritarian structure continues once the student enters the classroom, where America-hating professors can arbitrarily impose their anti-American morality on powerless students through grading.

The oppression continues when one looks at the curriculum where strenuous efforts by the anti-American leftists who brutally control college campuses have successfully marginalized and often eliminated course offerings which evince a sensitivity and acceptance of those who love their country."

source

I guess folks will just keep sending their kids and shoveling their income to these campus communists until the collapse of the Republic. These campus communists must truly be laughing.

Communists Should Not Teach In American Colleges - 1949

Institutions and Underworld Academics

Radical Son
"The situation in the universities was appalling. The Marxists and socialists who had been refuted by historical events were now the tenured establishment of the academic world. Marxism had produced the bloodiest and most oppressive regimes in human history -but after the fall, as one wit commented, more Marxists could be found on the faculties of American colleges than in the entire former Communist bloc."

"The American Historical Association was run by Marxists, as was the professional literature association, whose field had been transformed into a kind of pseudosociology of race-gender-class oppression. When Peter [Collier] and I were undergraduates in the Fifties, the mission of the university had been described by its guardians as 'the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.' It was now officially recast in radical terms as that of 'social transformation.' "

"With no trace of embarrassment, Richard Rorty, one of the most prominent figures in academic philosophy, even boasted that 'the power base of the Left in America is in the universities,' by which he meant not the students (who were generally apathetic if not conservative), but the faculties, administrations, and departments, who tried to recruit students to their political agendas."
[end of partial transcript]

"86 percent of those Americans who were interviewed said high school graduates should go on to college..."
Public Agenda for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. - 1998.

Little Johnny can get a good Marxist education and a good job. The two are synonymous don't you know. Lurkers of the World Unite!

Get them when they're young. For the children of course.

"Every Child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill, because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural Being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It's up to you teachers to make all of these sick children well by creating the international children of the future."
Taken from an address given at a childhood education seminar in 1973 by professor Chester M. Pierce of educational psychiatry at Harvard University speaking for the Association for Childhood Education International.

"The battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith. ....The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new--the rotting corpse of Christianity and the new faith of Humanism."
"A Religion for a New Age," The Humanist - January/February 1983, p. 26.

"Give me your four year olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state."
Vladimir Lenin

Get the news from CBS to facilitate totalitarianism.

.

They have their heroes.

The Fall of the Republic