Monday, March 27, 2017

The Enemy of the Melting Pot

Without  going into great detail, the enemy of the Melting Pot is Multiculturalism.
The United States was never meant to be multicultural.
Melting Pot: (from Wikipedia)
In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the metaphor of a “crucible” or “(s)melting pot” was used to describe the fusion of different nationalities, ethnicities and cultures. It was used together with concepts of America as an ideal republic and a “city upon a hill” or new promised land. It was a metaphor for the idealized process of immigration and colonization by which different nationalities, cultures and “races” (a term that could encompass nationality, ethnicity and race) were to blend into a new, virtuous community, and it was connected to utopian visions of the emergence of an American “new man”. The exact term “melting pot” came into general usage in 1908, after the premiere of the play The Melting Pot by Israel Zangwill.
Multiculturalism: (also from Wikipedia)
Multiculturalism is the acceptance of multiple ethnic cultures, for practical reasons and/or for the sake of diversity and applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g. schools, businesses, neighborhoods, cities or nations. In this context, multiculturalists advocate extending equitable status to distinct ethnic and religious groups without promoting any specific ethnic, religious, and/or cultural community values as central.
The Problem
The way I see it, although I am of German ancestry, I am an American. If we want to  play the ancestry game to its insane extreme, we are all Africans. Cultural Heritage? I guess my German Cultural Heritage mean I should drink only beer, eat only hot dogs, hamburgers and sauerkraut, and wear Lederhosen.  Maybe I should become a Nazi, just for good measure!
But all that would be insane. I might like beer, hot dogs, hamburgers and sauerkraut but I also like foods attributed to the Irish, Italian, Polish, Chinese, etc., and I have no intention of becoming a stupid Nazi.
Culture! The only culture I know, or thought I knew, is American - which is a hodgepodge of just about every culture you can think of.
What the melting pot does is make us one. What multiculturalism does is divide us into thought ghettos.
If you look at it from a politicians point of view, multiculturalism is a convenient way to divide and conquer. Any politician or social engineer who promotes multiculturalism wants to stick you in a little hole where it is easy to control you. They don't see you as an individual person. They see you as a pea in a pod they want to cook.

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