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Even a broken clock

Posted by $ blarman 7 years ago to Philosophy
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“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.


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  • Posted by Herb7734 7 years ago
    I always think of my grandparents. Especially Grandma. She had a very hard time with English. She could barely say "legislative" or "judicial." But I remember quizzing her from her citizenship pamphlet. Actually, I knew less than she did, because we were nor taught this stuff in school. If it weren't for that pamphlet, I would have been ignorant of its information and Grandma, whose accent was atrocious would have known more than me, a native born. She was, if you cared to ask, not a Polish-American she was an American citizen. Once when I was 10 or 11, I asked her what she liked, Poland or America better? She motioned me to follow her down a hallway, where we came to some built-in drawers, the bottom one with a lock. She took out an old fashioned key and opened the drawer. She said, "Poland, nothing." Then putting her finger to her lips, "Shhh" and opened the drawer that was filled to the brim with silver dollars. She smiled and said, "America."
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  • Posted by LibertyBelle 7 years ago
    Basically, I agree, but there may be cases where
    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.
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    • Posted by $ 7 years ago
      Agreed. There is certainly much to be said for those trying to adjust and speech patterns/etc. are a difficult thing to change. The differentiation is that with your Grandfather, he was trying to become an American.
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      • Posted by LibertyBelle 6 years, 11 months ago
        Actually, he did not have to become an American. He was born one. But I don't remember ever discussing Germany with him. I asked him once if he spoke (or could speak, I forget which) German, and he said something, which he then translated into English as "No, I do not speak German." I recall Grandma (Welsh in origin) saying "Huh! I remember a time when he couldn't hardly talk English." It was very unusual for her,a former teacher, to use a double negative; she knew German, however; she had used to teach children in High German, which they did not understand; however, there was a girl in the class who spoke both kinds, and translated the lesson into Low German, and so the instruction proceeded.
        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.
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    • Posted by Dobrien 7 years ago
      35 miles southwest of Minneapolis. Waconia surged in suburban development recently and grew to a population of 10,697 (according to the 2010 census). The town is home to the Waconia Wildcats Sports Teams. Thousands of nearby city residents attend the Carver County Fair which is held in Waconia.
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  • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 7 years ago
    That's why I have always said Black American, instead of African American...most do not come from Africa, many come from the Islands.

    But it would be nice to vaporize every racist liberal and Progressive and just refer to every legal citizen of America as "Americans".
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  • Posted by $ 7 years ago
    What I should have added is that Galt's Pledge takes from this very mentality: whatever you brought to the Gulch is fine, but here one rule remains primary: I will not put anyone else before myself.
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  • Posted by editormichael 7 years ago
    Not giving you a thumbs-down, still I disagree with what I think is your premise.Please correct me if I have misunderstood. First, as advocates of individualism, do we even really want such words or phrases as "citizen" or "Americanism"?
    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.
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    • Posted by $ 7 years ago
      We Associate into groups based on common, shared beliefs, i.e. culture. I don't find anything wrong with this. What I object to are people who want to hold inherently contradictory cultural views which are largely contained in these hyphenations. For example: Muslim-American. I'm sorry, but those two are largely at odds with each other given the history and ideology of Islam. African-American: they are two distinct continents. Mexican-American. Again - two distinct countries: which one are you a citizen of? Even Native American is somewhat of a misnomer because the land wasn't America back then and the peoples there were delineated based on their tribal affiliations - not geographic ones.

      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!
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  • Posted by $ Thoritsu 7 years ago
    Seems like the Asian immigration motto.
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    • Posted by $ 7 years ago
      I'm a little slow today - I'm missing the reference. Can you elucidate?
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      • Posted by $ Thoritsu 7 years ago
        Asian immigrants come to this country, and other than work ethic, largely blend in. They are the highest earning ethnic group (above Caucasians). They don't make a big deal out of being Asian (e.g. hyphenation). They don't bemoan some impressed status. They work, they earn, they succeed.

        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.
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        • -4
          Posted by CircuitGuy 7 years ago
          "the folly and disaster of asserting pride where none has been earned and blaming others for ones lot in life"
          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.
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          • Posted by $ 7 years ago
            "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.
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          • Posted by $ Thoritsu 7 years ago
            Uniter of BLM against the rest?
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            • -3
              Posted by CircuitGuy 7 years ago
              "Uniter of BLM against the rest?"
              I don't know if President Obama can rightly take credit for BLM,, but if he can it's another example.
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              • Posted by $ Thoritsu 7 years ago
                Example of what?
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                • -2
                  Posted by CircuitGuy 7 years ago
                  "Example of what?"
                  Just another example of a President Obama raising awareness of an important issue.
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                  • Posted by $ Thoritsu 7 years ago
                    We disagree on this. He poured gas on an very limited issue which maintains continuity largely because the "victims" continue to act with aggression rather than work, all for his own self-interest.
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                    • -3
                      Posted by CircuitGuy 7 years ago
                      "We disagree on this."
                      Wholeheartedly. As much as a president can do for this issue, he did a great job.
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                      • Posted by $ Thoritsu 7 years ago
                        Except, he did nothing to resolve it, only inflame it. Ferguson was a good example. Guy commits crime and then attack cop. Cop shoots felon. No issue, but the neighborhood erupted and destroyed its own things.
                        Blacks shooting blacks is ~5x more likely than a policeman shooting a black person.
                        How did Obama help this issue?
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                        • Posted by $ 7 years ago
                          Chicago is another prime example. It is Obama's home - the place one thinks he would be most connected to and most concerned about, yet his buddy Rahm Emmanuel is now the mayor and violence is going up - not down.
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                          • Posted by $ Thoritsu 7 years ago
                            This issue has gotten much worse in the last ten years, but not from offenses, principally from the reaction of the potentially offended.
                            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.
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  • Posted by ewv 6 years, 12 months ago
    There is nothing wrong with it for the first generation or so, objectively designating a real newly arrived group of new Americans with a common background, but not the permanent state of racist, balkanized "ethnicity" going back to everything from 50 years to the Indians.
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  • Posted by Eyecu2 7 years ago
    I had a rather lengthy discussion about this yesterday. I could have used this Roosevelt quote. Oh well day late and dollar short. As they say.
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