Even a broken clock
“There is no place here for the hyphenated American, and the sooner he returns to the country of his allegiance, the better.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Not a big fan of Teddy, but this statement I agree with. If you want to become a citizen of a nation, you have to leave everything else behind and become a citizen. If you want to become an American, leave the Mexican- or the African- or whatever other hyphenated nonsense behind. Americanism is for all - not for select groups.
Theodore Roosevelt
Not a big fan of Teddy, but this statement I agree with. If you want to become a citizen of a nation, you have to leave everything else behind and become a citizen. If you want to become an American, leave the Mexican- or the African- or whatever other hyphenated nonsense behind. Americanism is for all - not for select groups.
I always use that broken clock analogy :)
it is necessary to mention, for identification pur-
poses, or to warn somebody that when he meets
your foreign friend, he may find some difficulty
understanding him, due to his accent. (My ma-
ternal grandfather, who was born in Minnesota
and lived in this country until he died at 97, spoke with a German accent combined with a
stutter, because Waconia, the town he was from,
was settled by Germans, and I believe that he
grew up mainly around German-speaking people).--This does not mean that he had any
allegiance whatever to Germany, either in World
War I or II.
I have been there several times in my child-
hood, when we went to visit my grandparents;
but they are both deceased, so there is no reason for me to go there now, unfortunately.My
mother, when living, used to get a weekly paper, ( saw that word in blue ink when I checked it, but it won't show you anything.)
The Waconia Patriot. My father (from Iowa)
said that everybody in that town had a nick-
name, and that if you got a nickname there you
carried it to your grave.Grandpa's nickname was
"Harrigan" because of singing that song so much, and my father said he believed that if he
signed it that way on a contract it would stand
up in court.--But enough of my ratchetjawing.
But it would be nice to vaporize every racist liberal and Progressive and just refer to every legal citizen of America as "Americans".
Or "allegiance"? Especially to something so amorphous or, worse, collectivist as to a country?
In my not at all humble opinion, thinking of oneself with any kind of group label is what is wrong, not necessarily with the label.
My ancestry is Scot, Irish, Welsh (teeny bit), Jewish, and one of the more-or-less native tribes, probably Creek, although my genealogy-studying ancestor swore it was Cherokee.
Well, so what?
Whatever my ancestors did -- and the Irish stole horses from the Brits and were honored for it, including by me -- or didn't do really does NOT define me.
I studied Ayn Rand.
Now that helps define me. But DNA or ancestral home-land or skin color does not.
Nor does geography, except insofar as native plant life affects allergies.
So, no offense to blarman, though plenty to most of the Roosevelts, but racial or ethnic or tribal or geographical identity is antithetical to my concept of individual self-identification.
Association continues in the use of "individualist" or "Objectivist" - referring to a set of cultural or ideological beliefs. Religious affiliations are probably the most common here.
The question is what kind of differences in these various associations can be tolerated or accommodated without destroying the commonality which binds us all as Americans. The notion of multi-culturalism has crept into our society in recent years and it holds that America is great because of its diversity of cultures. This is patently false if we look at history. What made America great was the fact that immigrants came here to get away from the strict religious cultures of their lands (mostly Western Europe) to have the freedom to associate according to their own beliefs and understandings. But more than that there were the individualistic beliefs in personal responsibility, individual rights, self-sufficiency, and opportunity that became the glue holding together American society.
The notion of multi-culturalism holds that all cultural mores are of equal value - which if one thinks about it is patently absurd. A society can not stand if it attempts to embrace competing cultural values because those same cultural values become the basis of the laws of that civilization. Contradictory laws lead to lawlessness and anarchy - and not the kind of anarchy that comes from not having a government, but the kind of anarchy which results in the same end game present at the end of Atlas Shrugged where everyone was a criminal and the way you avoided prosecution was by being one of the prosecutors!
I assert clear fact voids claims of bigotry and ethnic bias in the US. Rather it illustrates the folly and disaster of asserting pride where none has been earned and blaming others for ones lot in life, which is a widespread cultural mess we have created, and that disgusting manipulative O-scumbag nurtured and fed on like a bacteriological infection, rather than bringing us all together.
It's folly, disastrous, and also annoying. I think President Obama did a great job offering a positive alternative to this, the extent it is the POTUS's job to do that. I think President Obama shares the vision Eboo Patel describes in Acts of Faith. All politicians claim to be "uniters", but President Obama delivered.
In what way, pray tell? Did he unite people when he accused a DC policeman of harassing a professor because the professor was black - only to find out later that the professor was breaking the law? Did he unite people in the Trayvon Martin case when he said Trayvon would have been his son? Or the Michael Brown case where he sided with BLM before even hearing the evidence? What about when he doubled down to protect Eric Holder when under fire for Fast and Furious?
What about his royal attitude where instead of working with Republicans he said he would use his "pen and his phone" to circumvent Congress? What about when he called Northeasterners "bitter clingers to God and guns"? What about the time when he openly cackled about the fact that because the Democrats had majorities in Congress plus the Executive that Republicans would just have to deal with it?
Good grief! Obama was the most polarizing president we've ever had in office - not the most conciliatory.
I don't know if President Obama can rightly take credit for BLM,, but if he can it's another example.
Just another example of a President Obama raising awareness of an important issue.
Wholeheartedly. As much as a president can do for this issue, he did a great job.
Blacks shooting blacks is ~5x more likely than a policeman shooting a black person.
How did Obama help this issue?
My kids don't even see "ethnic groups". However, I go to Milwaukee often for business. Our factory is in a bad neighborhood. People drive like maniacs, passing on the right in bike lanes, and other bizarre behavior. There has been a shooting withing a few blocks each week, the last three weeks. NONE were police shooting people.
I simply do not see oppression and bigotry as the issue here. Pride, assignment of blame and lack of responsibility are rampant. Obama poured gas on this, and set the entire black community back 25 years.