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Mom's
This little Hawaiian girl came, oddly enough, from...Hawaii (go figure) Food for thought You've got to be taught - Rogers and Hammerstein I am a theatre critic OK...so it's a new "career", but if you're interested in reading my reviews, go here Updated 2/11/01 WHAT I'M READING... Christmas gift from my friend, Diane, who felt it was time I learn more about Australia WHAT I WATCHED... 60
Minutes Touched
by an Angel That's it for today!
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COMIN' TO AMERICA 19 February 2001 Bonnie of The Chattering reported on a sermon her pastor gave this morning. In it she says,
While I suspect the remark was aimed more at words about specific individuals, it brought to mind something that has been bothering me for a couple of days now. Someone I talked with recently told me about an experience at a favorite restaurant. "We don’t go there any more... the [ethnic group] has taken over." This was said with upturned nose and dismissive gesture about the new management of this particular restaurant. Another comment I hear far too often is "I just hate to go [to someplace] because there are so many [ethnic group] there. They seem to have taken over." And another, "Those [ethnic group] have just ruined [location]. Occasionally I find the nerve to speak up and say what’s on my mind. But it never produces a pleasant result and usually I just ignore the comment. That just makes me guilty of bigotry by association. This white Anglo-Saxon mentality that certain places need to be run by people who look like us, or that places where we’ve always lived need to remain populated by people who look like us strikes me as incredible arrogance. The notion seems to be that only people like us are clean, honest, hard-working, intelligent ... fill in your own positive adjective ... and that, by default, anybody who does not look like us or speak our language is suspect, lazy, and stupid. The notion that people who have come to this country from somewhere else are ruining the land that we have held for so long is bigoted in the extreme. I don't know about you, but my great grandparents came here from Ireland and from Scotland. They moved in and made their own niche in this land where they hoped to find a better life. Now while they may have fit in to the existing neighborhood a little easier because they had the proper "look," you just bet there were folks who listened to their accent and looked down their nose. "Those people have just ruined the neighbornood," I imagine many were thinking. My ancestors moved to neighborhoods with other people who came from Scotland or Ireland. The people were familar. The accents were familiar. They cooked the foods of the old country and they made their new home a comfortable place to live and to raise a family, learning, over time, to blend the culture of their new country with the culture of their native land. My family and other Irish/Scottish immigrants have now been in this country long enough that we can look down our own noses at the new crop of immigrants coming from countries where they may be experiencing hardship, following their dream of living in the United States. (Are the streets still paved with gold here?) They may be Chinese or Mexican or Iranian or Russian or Vietnamese or African or any number of nationalities who look different or talk different or eat different foods, or use different methods of writing. But they are all coming here for the same reason my great grandparents came--to make a better life for themselves in this country. Some of those immigrants are going to be lazy, stupid, dishonest, and not very nice people to be around.
By the same token, some of these immigrants are going to be honest, hard working and intelligent (you try living in a foreign country, learning the language and customs and tell me it’s not hard!). It bothers me a lot when whole groups of people are dismissed out of hand just for belonging to a group. What’s wrong with the [ethnic group] moving into a city, establishing businesses, buying homes, bringing their families over from the old country, and starting new lives...just like my ancestors did. What’s wrong with the [ethnic group] buying a restaurant, bringing in friends or other members of their ethnic group to run the place. Are they unclean? Do they not have to adhere to the same sanitary standards that other restaurants do? We white Ango-Saxons haven’t done all that great by the land that we took control of after we herded the Native Americans onto reservations. (Do you suppose they said "Well, there goes the neighborhood." as they watched the white man destroy the cultures which had existed peacefully in this country for hundreds of years?) We have overpopulation, pollution, escalating violence, and a host of problems that can be traced back to the descendants of my ancestors and people who looked just like them. I suppose that it’s irrational to think that people who look different, whose customs are different, whose beliefs are different will some day, somewhere live side by side in peace. But surely there is more to be gained in this world by learning how to get along with each other than by rejecting each other without ever having taken the trouble to get to know one another. I suppose that idea is just too far out to be even considered. |
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Some pictures from this journal |
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Created 2/19/01 by Bev Sykes |
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