Gibson Jonathan wrote:
Wow, you sound like a real bummed out grump on this. I grew up in
white-bread Oregon and long held the view that place needed some salsa
in the worst way. Our culture would be terminally bland and insular if
we were only breeding as you seem to advocate. Our melting pot strengths
easily out-shadow the congenital weakness an isolated culture fosters as
it denies mutation and change. China did it for a long time, but it only
made them a push-over for a dynamic British military empire. As I look
for a silver lining in the Katrina disaster my fervent hope is that
somehow the truly remarkable, rich, vibrant & amazingly creative society
we call New Orleans can affect this nation positively - let a thousand
Mardi Gras parades flow!
---
You don't have to convince me about the advantages of a melting pot. As
I have stated elsewhere, my wife and the mother of my three grown
children is part of a large family of Hispanic immigrants who came here
from El Salvador in the 1960s and 1970s. I am "white bread" from Omaha,
Nebraska. But both my closest brother and I graduated from high school
in El Paso, Texas which is more Hispanic than Anglo. And both of us
married Hispanic, Spanish-speaking women who bore us many children. I
love many things about my own culture, but I can clearly see some
terrible flaws. And while there are also flaws in the Hispanic culture
that is growing in our midst, it also has some marvelous strengths and
admirable characteristics. One of them is how much they value their
children, how central their extended families are to their lives, and
how willing they are to work their butts off, not to satisfy ambition
and desire for status in the community, but to provide good lives for
their wives and children. My own parents had post-graduate degrees and
lucrative professions. Yet of my father's 9 children by three different
wives, only two ever finished college. My wife's parents never finished
grade school, yet of their 8 children, all but two of them finished not
only college but obtained post graduate degrees and have raised large
families.
This country really needs these immigrants. I believe that every last
one of them should come here legally rather than illegally. But I
believe they are a great blessing to this country. And they feel the
same way about having children and share the same disdain and disgust
for abortion that I do. Or course most of them are Catholic, but maybe
that is why after the Protestants die out in North America, there will
still be many Catholics. That is if they don't all become atheists and
agnostics after a few years of worshiping our consumer goods the way
most Americans do.
--
John W. Redelfs [EMAIL PROTECTED]
============================================
"Since we are all children of the same Heavenly Father,
we really are all brothers and sisters." --Uncle Bob
============================================
All my opinions are tentative pending further data. --JWR
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