I watched a commercial today for Target, one about babies and moms happily experiencing life - a pleasant enough, benign ad, except for one thing: It was half in Spanish. Now don't get me wrong, I appreciate other cultures (I myself am part Armenian, Filipino, and Spanish), but this commercial made me angry. I even wrote an email to Target about it. After the initial anger wore off, I realized there was something more to my reaction. Anger is a secondary emotion, after all. My reaction was one of fear.
I fear the deterioration of the English language. I understand that language evolves over time, and today's vernacular is very different from what it was 50 years ago. I even recall a time, fairly recently, too, when I was watching a television sitcom from the late 1970s (Mork and Mindy, fun show :). It struck me at how odd some of the dialog sounded. It seems this deconstruction of our language is somewhat inevitable, but I want to do what I can to preserve it.
I fear the subtle acceptance of illegal immigrants, as we in the United States bend over backwards to make every possible allowance for them, including printing documents in every language, especially the documents for welfare, and paying for all their medical care. I mean, where are all the tree huggers when you need them? If we only ever printed official documentation in English, we'd save so many trees! (I'm being facetious, but it WOULD save time and money to print stuff in only one language, and put everything else online.)
I fear big government inviting people to be completely dependent on them. If a government holds the purse strings, it also holds the newspaper (meaning they also control what information goes to the masses). Bottom line, the laws need to change, so people who are earnestly trying to come here, who want to contribute to this country, can do so in such a manner that it won't be as worthwhile to jump the line (or the fence). We need laws that make true independence more alluring than government handouts.
I fear losing this nation to another. In my religion, it teaches that the unrighteous will lose their land unless they repent. People have been taking God out of our country for decades, and now with families and overall morality deteriorating left and right, we as a nation are facing the natural consequences: Illegal aliens are going to end up taking this land from us, because we are no longer righteous stewards.
But I digress... What I really fear is the dissolution of this great nation. If we keep touting diversity as the underlying foundation, we will fall. The word "diversity" itself has its roots in the word "divide." I'm all for appreciating and celebrating different cultures, but what do we have in common anymore? Different languages, different religions, different cultures - a common language would easily bring back the unity this nation needs, without infringing on anyone else's rights. We obviously can't declare a national religion, and a lot of what makes this nation great is its "melting pot" essence, lots of ideas coming together to make the USA better.
A common language would help us work through our diversity. How many times have you tried to talk with someone whose native language was not your own? There's lots of smiling and nodding, simple sentences and short exchanges, for fear of the message getting lost, for fear of offending the other person. A lot of the time it's incredibly awkward, because you're not quite sure if the other person really understood what you were saying, and at worst you DO offend the other person. It's hard enough dealing with the cultural differences of someone who does speak English, who grew up on the opposite side of the country than you. Add a foreign language into the mix and it's no wonder we're all walking on eggshells. We don't understand each other.
We need one, declared national language to unify us. We can't let disasters like terrorist bombings and hurricanes be the only thing that brings us together, because people forget those feelings. Language is only one factor among many for what can determine the success or failure of a nation, but it bothers me to see how close we are to destruction, and how few conservative voices are speaking up against it.
No comments:
Post a Comment