BALKANIZATION?

I have stated that I am not going to write about politics, but there are times when I feel like I need to talk about issues. I have to preface my little rant with the reminder that I haven’t written much about the immigration situations since my fourth or fifth post on the blog. This is, in part, because I have mixed feelings about the situation, and, in part because I can’t really cope with the wild generalizations set forth as argument by both my wingnut and moonbat blogger friends. I mean generalizations like : “They are all already criminals, they broke the law when they entered the United States.” This claim is made baldfaced by people who break the law themselves. Look at yourselves in the mirror. When was the last time anyone drove a car any distance without breaking at least three traffic laws. How many of these claims are made by folks who have NEVER carried home from work a tool, or some paper, or some pens, or played a game of solitare in the office, or looked up a porn newsgroup on the company computer. . . you get the idea. Most of us try to obey the law all the time, but income tax returns are so complex that I doubt that any American Citizen has ever filed a tax return (except maybe the short form) without breaking some law about which someone could make accusations. I get antsy about anyone who talks about a individuals, automatically adding them to a group or subgroup then uses the term THEY, then attibutes characteristics to them just because they are placed in the group, as if all members of the group were created with identical molds or templates.

On the other hand, the temerity of a city or other governmental body declaring itself a place where people have sanctuary from the enforcement of federal law just infuriates me. This is even more irritating because they are selective about which laws the sanctuary protects from. Immigrations laws, Okay, but kidnapping and bank robbing we aren’t sure we want to make subject to the sanctuary.

I even get a little crazy about the repeated chant of “SECURE THE BORDER” by people who don’t have a clue about the implications of a truly secure border. Between 1954 and 1967 I often lived where I could ride my bicycle to see a “secure“ border; the one between Finland and the Soviet Union. It was a chilling sight with a tall, electrified, fence with plowed and harrowed ground on both sides so that footprints could be seen in the soft dirt. There were guard towers at regular intervals with guards that were willing to shoot those attempting to cross, and YOU KNOW WHAT? Some people were willing to put their lives on the line and some still crossed the border, or found ways to get across- - and, we Americans called them heroes. And I don’t want to live in a land with truly secured borders because that kind of control spreads to medicine, to jobs, to schools and all kinds of other governmental or quasi- governmental systems.

Now that I have ticked off all my friends, I can write about the subject that brought me to the computer. I have a niece who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada where her husband has a thriving dental practice.. A few months ago, they decided to buy a new home and move to another part of the community. When they entered their kids in school, they discoved that in the new school, classes, for EVERYONE, are taught for half a day in English, and for the other half day in Spanish. These are not “English as a second language, or Spanish as a second language” classes, these are the classes in Math, Science and other core classes.
Their daughter, a first grader found this fun and exciting. The son, a fifth grader found it depressing to go from being one of the honor students in his previous school to be struggling to maintain a C average because he didn’t understand what in the h*ll his teachers were saying most of the time. This is one of the stupidest, least ethical and destructive educational practices I have ever heard of. To arrange a special class where numbers of students who don’t speak English might learn English is, to me, a salutory idea. I also think that Americans ought to learn foreign languages in order to function in what hs become a world marketplace. I once had a fair reading knowledge of both Russian and Spanish, am still fairly fluent in Finnish, and was able to, sort of, Pidgeon Swedish my way across Sweden, and expect that with a little more training I will someday be able to understand the English of stage comedians and bus conductors from Great Britain. I have one son fluent in Korean and minimally functional in French, another, fluent in Spanish, and he has had Army Language School training in Russian. Another son who is fluent in Japanese and who was, a number of years ago semi-functional in German. I believe in foreign languages, but this program in Las Vegas is the type of thing that will Balkanize the United States and continue what is already a frightening process of dividing us into hyphenated Americans.

I may feel more tolerant than most about the degree of –even unlawful—immigration into our country, and the prospect of deporting, or otherwise exporting 12,000,000 people who, in spite of the luddites and lump brains who keep claiming that “They are being medicated and educated on My dime”, are making a significant positive imprint upon our economy, paying a LOT of local, state and federal taxes. (Ask the city administrations of those towns where the feds have closed down major industries because too many of the workers were undocumented) and the picture of millions of men women an children shipped by train or bus to another country is reminiscent of Nazi Germany to me. But the idea of changing our nation to fit their culture(s) and their language (s) is repellent to me, and dangerous to us all. If individuals wish to come, learn to be Americans, learn the language (In the State of Washington one can vote in as many as four different languages), become citizens, then I, for one, welcome them. If they want to come and expect us to cater to them culturally and otherwise, I vote for sending them home. (When everyone I know, from both political sides had quit throwing bombs at me, I will come out from under the bed and post again.