ONCE AGAIN MULTICULTURALISM IS DEAD - DIVERSITY DOESN"T WORK

Think Asian Carp and Kudzu. Previous post on the subject Some things just aren't good to incorporate into a homogenized society. If you look at Europe as the test case for importing cheap labor from groups of people who have no interest in immersing themselves into the culture of the host country, you'd have to admit the test failed to ameliorate the goals. What has happened has been a chaotic clash of cultures. History could have taught this anyway, but evidently there are people who get into powerful positions in governments who have never studied history and have some unfounded and abstract idea of how to run the planet. This has been a costly mistake over the ages and especially recently for France, Germany, and now the Netherlands.

Netherlands Abandoning Multiculturalism At American Thinker today, Thomas Lifson reports:
"A new integration bill (covering letter and 15-page action plan), which Dutch Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner presented to parliament on June 16, reads: "The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and plans to shift priority to the values of the Dutch people. In the new integration system, the values of the Dutch society play a central role. With this change, the government steps away from the model of a multicultural society."

Let this be a harbinger of smart thinking to the coming leadership of America. The Progressive mantras of "Diversity," "Multicuralism,"and even "Social Justice" are ideas wrought in the halls of anti-culturalism studies in universities. Anti-culturalism and multiculturalism are two sides of the same coin. (two names for the same thing.) By placing the ideology of "multiculturalism" into a cohesive society with traditional morés and laws, you are, in total effect, eliminating cohesiveness and diluting a culture into incompatible factions, i.e. creating an anti-culture. When our forefathers gave us the freedom to associate, they meant for people of common interests to associate with each other, unfettered by unreasonable interference by government. What progressives have done is to force incompatible cultures into what was a cohesive culture and call it "Multiculturalism," or "Diversity."

Common interests could include many things, but France, Germany, and now the Dutch have learned that they have allowed immigrating populations into their countries who have little or no common interests with the host cultures. (We could have told them this from the lessons of the fall of the Roman Empire, but would they have listened?"

Now if we can only educate our leadership to take that lesson and apply it to our own country, we'd be light years ahead of the curve once again. Instead, we have historically illiterate imbeciles requiring "Diversity" and "Multicultural" programs in order to qualify for government grants and subsidies, using our own tax dollars to implement a deliberate destruction of the American culture. Yes, there was, and hopefully still is, an American culture based on a cohesive determination of our laws and morés....and no, this does not mean we can't enjoy some different cuisine in American restaurants or a dance review by some talented Russians or Irish. The line of demarcation inevitably comes when mass chaos of too many competing values, laws, languages, and morés ensues when concentrated in one place. Hopefully, some adult with wisdom arrives to draw both a figurative and literal line in the sand. That is what has happened in Europe. The mistakes of "Multicuralism" and "Diversity" are what they are trying to put the brakes on in Europe. If only our country would get the message.

Well, today I congratulate the Dutch for recognizing the error of their ways and doing something to try to reverse the tide. I guess the question remains on what to do with all of those people who refuse to assimilate. We'll be watching.

RECIPE FOR DISASTER - REDEFINING AMERICA

Is a Peach pie the same thing as a Chocolate cake?  Is America the same thing as Communist China?  Are two men (or two women) in a sexual relationship the same thing as a married man and woman?  Is tofu the same thing as filet mignon? 

"One of these things is not like the other"....as our cute little friends on Sesame Street used to tell us.  I could sing the little introductory song for you right now...thinking back to those sweet days with my children when they were little.  Teaching children to discriminate between objects is a way to help children learn to understand the world they live in.  Hot is not cold.  Hard is not soft.  Red is not white.  Up is not down.  Critical thinking is a tool for people to make choices. Children need critical thinking to learn how to decide what they need and like in life.  They need lessons in critical thinking as they grow up in order to see how things work and why.  That was then and now is now.  Last time I checked on Sesame Street the message has changed to "diversity."  My kids are grown now and over the last few years I have only seen a couple of episodes of Sesame Street by chance.  Those couple of episodes opened my eyes to how the left has taken a good thing and turned it into slimy twist of indoctrination to suit the messages of social engineers.  One of the episodes I happened upon featured a furry puppet neighborhood lecture on acceptance of our new Spanish speaking friends who have come to live with us.  It was not encouraging the Spanish speaking friends to learn English and assimilate into American culture, but rather telling American children to learn Spanish and celebrate the Mexican culture.  The premise of the show was tolerance, inclusiveness, and diversity, but only as a one way street.  Not the Sesame Street my kids grew up with.

Many generations of children have now been socially engineered to ignore critical thinking of facts and history.  Children are not allowed to explore questions such as; Are Muslims different from Christians?  Are Americans the same as Chinese?  Is American government different from the Iranian government?  Do the Swiss think just like the Pakistanis?  Can you tell the difference between right and wrong?  Do peaches belong in a chocolate cake?

Now we get; Shouldn't Heather have two mommies?  Why shouldn't the Prince marry another Prince? Isn't Ché the same as Thomas Jefferson?  Isn't Fidel the same as George Washington?  Isn't Mao the same as Benjamin Franklin?  If someone else commits a crime, shouldn't we all be punished?  Does your life belong to you or does it really belong to the world?   Doesn't God want you to use compact fluorescent light bulbs?   And the left indoctrinators answer those questions for your children who are not allowed to think for themselves, ask critical questions, or rely on their parents for answers.  Once we put the schools in charge of sex education, we gave the schools carte blanche to tell our children all kinds of things in every subject, things incompatible with our own history, doctrines, and thinking...including personal lifestyle decisions. Does anyone, seeing the results of this, still think that was a good idea? (By the way, the topic in schools used to be hygiene, not sexual preferences.)

Seems to me there was once a world where peoples were different and they collected themselves into like-minded groups, created cultures with idiosyncrasies unto their own.  For a time, Americans had the choice of discriminating between friends and enemies. Trade with other nations was a good thing because we could enjoy Irish lace, Belgian linens, Chinese porcelains, Swiss chocolates, French wines, and Peruvian wools.  At the same time, we didn't allow trade with those who were incompatible with the security of our nation.  We used critical thinking to draw lines between useful trade and detrimental trade.  The idea was to enjoy the products of the world, but only to the extent we did not damage our sovereignty. Where did that criteria go? 

Even within America we enjoyed the disparate cultures and products across the continent.  Texan beef, cheese from Wisconsin, steel from Pittsburgh,PA or Birmingham,AL, glass from Corning, NY., textiles from North Carolina, pottery from the river clays in Ohio, Amish quilts, Napa grapes, etc.  The commerce clause was used to facilitate trade between the manufacturing sectors of the states.  This was the delicious melting pot.  Now the commerce clause is used to force Obamacare down our throats and will be used to force same-sex marriage on every state.  Critical thinking for you is out the window.  Now the Federal government is hell bent to make those decisions for you, including what you can and cannot buy, eat, and do.

Back to the pie and the cake.  The left has thrown the peaches into the chocolate cake and called it "diversity."   It tastes lousy and doesn't work.  Conversely they have thrown chocolate into the peach pie and told you to call it "tolerance." Tolerance, like all things on the left, is now defined as having minorities demand things of the rest of us.   Now we have neither, peach pie nor chocolate cake.  We have a pile of mud, not fit for consumption.  Translate this into every single element of our language and our lives.  A non-profit is now an NGO. (non-governmental organization mixing tax dollars with pet projects.) Illegal immigration is now legal, by virtue of Federal neglect.  Environmentalism is now religion.  Marriage is now anything you want it to mean.  The White House celebrates Cinco de Mayo and Ramadan, and decorates Christmas tree ornaments with images of Mao.   

The American idea of the "melting pot," which conjured up a delicious stew of compatible ingredients, is now a pot full of incompatible entities at odds with each other.  People are no longer allowed to discriminate on what is real and what is fake, what is legitimate and what is not, what is moral and what is not, who owns what and who doesn't, who is a victim and who isn't. More importantly people are no longer given the responsibility and opportunity to critically think their way through these decisions. The leftists in our Federal government are making those decisions for you now.  Give it up...don't try to think.  Just go eat mud. 



(a side note:  Way back in my youth, several decades ago, two female teachers lived together as a "couple."  One was the algebra teacher.  The other taught English composition and English Lit.  No one said a word except to say they were a "couple."  No one bullied them.  No one made a big stink about their arrangement.  They had salaries and benefits the same as all of the other teachers.  They had their own network of family and friends.  They owned their own house and lived about two blocks away from my house.  These two teachers did not proselytize their ways to the students.  Neither did they come on to students in any sexual manner.  They just were good (though very strict, as I recall) teachers who were left to live how they wanted to live and we were all fine with that. This worked for everyone.  I can think of nothing wrong with this.  It was, I guess, a civilian version of "Don't ask, don't tell."  Their estates were left to each other or families.  They were not told they could not visit each other in hospital.  They took care of each other just fine.  No one minded. They were respectively left to their private lives, as they wished to live.  No one was screaming about discrimination.  "Live and let live" seemed to work for everyone involved.  Novel idea, eh?



If tax law is the problem with supposed "inequality" in the marriage debate.....a 10% flat tax on every citizen with no loopholes or tax breaks for anyone would fix this. On health insurance, male same sex unions are still more risky than heterosexual unions, so let the insurance companies reflect that as they need to do. (insurance cos. are using statistics to punish other activities such as over-eating or smoking, whether I agree with that or not..which I don't...but with that premise, why not homosexuality?) Otherwise, leave marriage alone.)

I DON'T GRADE ON THE CURVE

I remember once, some long time ago, my older brother in a moment of extreme frustration yelled, "Look, I'll play by the rules if someone would just tell me what the rules are!" He was in the middle of a changing landscape where he had based his life on a set of rules which kept moving away from him, rules that kept him at a disadvantage. He was finding out that everybody had some arbitrary set of rules requiring him to adapt to the unfamiliar and uncomfortable.(Sort of like the book, "Who Moved My Cheese," where you are in a constant sea of change, trying to catch up with the next set of requirements.)

This came to me as I was reading an article on ethnic quotas over at American Thinker The article says:

"The Boston Globe reports that the University of Massachusetts is setting up a med-school set-aside program: "Under an initiative set to be finalized today, the state's only public medical school [i.e., at UMass] will partner with UMass campuses in Boston, Amherst, Lowell, and Dartmouth to create a joint baccalaureate-MD program that would ensure admission for aspiring doctors from underrepresented ethnic and socioeconomic groups. . . . The medical school will set aside 12 slots in its 125-student, first-year class for qualified students from groups underrepresented among Massachusetts doctors. Those groups include African-Americans, Hispanics, certain Southeast Asians, and Cape Verdeans, Brazilians, and other Portuguese speakers. Students of any ethnic background from low-income families or those among the first in their families to attend college would also qualify."

I am averse to affirmative action and have always been. (There were better and other options to get blacks in inner cities up to the education levels of the norm.) After years of Head Start, Smart Start, and g'zillions of tax dollars thrown at education of the minorities, I can't see that much, if anything, has been accomplished. And now that we have had at least two generations subjected to affirmative action programs, I believe the field has been tilted, not leveled. There now exists a very large chip on the shoulders of minorities and an entitlement mentality. If that is "progress," then you can have it. I don't want it.

I would be willing to bet that announcement from UMASS has everything to do with "Stimulus" money, where the U.S. government will hand out money only IF you play by their rules of affirmative action. So what are the rules?

You can't discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity....unless you are the Federal Government? And that is what my brother's angst expressed. The rules are different for some people than others. Instead of equal opportunity using the same set of rules for everyone, the government is grading on the curve. The Federal Government for many years now is all about making rules for some people, picking winners and losers, redistributing your money, and using tax dollars to shore up pet programs. (To be fair, it isn't just the Federal Government. Progressives are now in place in all levels of government, local and state.)

The Constitution was written to prevent this very kind of abuse, not that "progressive" government bureaucrats give a tinker's damn about the Constitution. Remember the slogans of the Socialists / Leftists / Progressives / Liberals / Communists are full of anti-Constitutional principles that are cleverly cloaked in language meant to confuse the public. "Social Justice" instead of "Equal Justice," is but one example. "Green Jobs" instead of "Jobs," "Smart Growth" instead of "Economic Growth." They co-opted the education system, the economic system, the judicial system, the banking system, etc. Now going into the health care system and trying to "socialize it" as well. Not equalize it..."socialize" it. Everything the "progressives" do is tilted, graded on the curve of redistribution.

My brother died at age 59, full of angst and frustration. No wonder.

DIVERSITY = DIVISIVENESS

Once upon a time in America there was a great feeling of "WE." We were all Americans. I hear politicians make silly swooning statements regarding the days after 9/11, indicating that they thought it was soooo terrific that we had all come together with one purpose. They say, "We were all Americans after 9/11." I don't think so. Not by a long shot. We haven't been united as Americans since the 1960's, the era of hyphens. In the 1960's, out of the progressive black organizations, came the idea that to divide Black-Americans/ African-Americans was suddenly a source of pride. Prior to this, the hyphenated Americans were looked down upon as 'Not quite American,' not fully American. Immigrants who had loyalty to some other father nation were down-graded to be less than 'real' Americans.

Funny, before that, as I grew up in integrated schools in Ohio, we were all Americans. Period. No hyphens. No funny business. No reason to think otherwise. We were Americans....black, white, oriental, mixed, whatever. No one in my entire childhood made any big deal of anyone's ancestral heritage as if they were less than American. My great-great grandparents were Germans who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1800's to escape religious persecution. Believe me, they were glad to be here and proud to be strong, independent, contributors to the American way of life, and free to be whoever they were. The blacks I knew as I was growing up were beside me in school, worked in middle class jobs, owned businesses, and also, free to be whoever they were. In my school, they were tandem with us...athletes, cheerleaders, scholars...side by side. As with any 'group' of people, there were many differences in their achievements, but they were not looked upon as a lesser class of people. Did I grow up in utopia? No. Just a small town in mid-century America. What small amount of discrimination I saw, was just that....small and not tolerated.

The issue of hyphenated Americans was addressed in an earlier time by leaders who saw the hyphens exactly for what they were; divisive. Since I addressed Teddy Roosevelt previously, and not in a supportive way, I will now give you something from Teddy Roosevelt that I support. Here is a yr. 1915 quote from him on the hyphenated American concept:


"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all... The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic... There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else."

From that time until the 1960's, being hyphenated was a derogatory term. Somehow in the sixties, all of a sudden it was the battle cry of blacks to say, "I'm Black, I'm proud." As if whites were walking around just saying, "I'm White, I'm proud." Then PBS showed the movie "Roots," sometime in the 1970's to reinforce the African loyalties of blacks in America. This morphed into African-American hyphenated everything. Blacks in America decided they weren't really Americans, they were African-Americans.

Today, besides being divided up into political polar opposites, our country is divided into every ethnic and country-of-origin designation possible. Is it any wonder that America is at odds with itself? No one seems to know where their loyalties lie. More time is spent on encouraging "diversity" than unity. No consensus can be achieved with this kind of premise. None. As long as children are taught that they are really something other than Americans, that they are Africans first, or Muslims first, or Mexicans first, gay first, gender first, or whatever else first, there can be no consensus on America first.

Compounding the dangerously ridiculous is that we now have one of the hyphenated as President of the United States, who billed himself as a "uniter" but now can easily be seen as one of the most divisive personalities to ever hit the political stage. None of Obama's policies have gained consensus anywhere in America. He has people divided on health care, cap and trade, bailouts, Afghanistan, and everything else he touches. He has divided people up into camps....either socialist or freedom loving American. Everything he proposes is un-American at its core. The irony is that so many Americans were voting based on the hope that his Presidency would end the divide and end the hyphens. They thought Obama would represent the all-inclusive America that we, out here in the middle of America, would like to see. Instead, he is carving us up into hispanics, blacks, muslims, gays/lesbians/transgenders, socialists, big-government, globalists, etc. against the rest of us; whites, anglo-saxon, heterosexual, constitutional, Christian, capitalist, freedom loving Americans. Wherever you look within his government, you find people with an axe to grind, an agenda supporting one group or another, but none who are Americans first.

Obama will never create a consensus out of "diversity." A successful country doesn't celebrate its 'diversity.' It celebrates its common love of the tenets on which the country is based. This is a lesson that evidently Obama and the Marxists surrounding him never learned in the halls of Harvard and Yale. They must have spent more time on "Divide and Conquer" than learning the lessons of American exceptionalism, the U.S. Constitution, and how America's success is based on the respect for the individual, not the "group" think of hyphens.