Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to re: Parsing

I give you... the Salem Witch Trials.
Mary Anne — (archived)

I give you Jim Crow.

I give you the gentlemen's agreements that kept Jews out of communities for years.

I give you "No Irish Need Apply".

I give you the wonderful, attractive adjectives used to describe people "not like us": wop, spic, chink, gook, etc., and the discrimination practiced against them in housing and employment.

I give you the Japanese internment camps.

I give you the Indian Boarding School in Carlisle, PA.

Just a few glaring examples of what fear of the other has done to this country.

And now that respect and recognition are being afforded to nonAnglo cultures as a matter of course, I give you the new call of the nativist: multiculturalism will destroy Western values.

I'll grant you this: it's a new approach to an old tactic. Before, the attack was direct on the individuals. Now, it's conceptual. So much more genteel. Nevertheless, the aims are the same. Don't tell me it can't happen any more. It happens over and over.

Western culture can certainly be killed more easily from the inside. Paranoia and exclusion can sneak into its bedroom, tie a plastic bag over its head and smother it while it's sleeping.

This country is a nation of laws. It's not a culturally based nation. Language is important because that's what our most basic law and our important political documents are written in. Apart from that, the United States is a great nation because we have many cultures.

And about Islam: it's a religion. We have an Amendment that protects it. Wanna repeal it because some of us are scared? Talk about dismantling ourselves from the inside...!

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