Every now and then, I get a forward from someone I generally think of as having a sound mind that blows me away in its incomprehenisble ignorance. Today, I got one containing comments attributed to Andy Rooney (note: Andy Rooney did not make these comments). Some highlights:
I believe that if you are selling me a milk shake, a pack of cigarettes, a newspaper or a hotel room, you must do it in English! As a matter of fact, if you want to be an American citizen you should have to speak English!
My father and grandfather shouldn't have to die in vain so you can leave the countries you were born in to come over and disrespect ours.
I think the police should have every right to shoot your sorry ass if you threaten them after they tell you to stop. If you can't understand the word "freeze" or "stop" in English, see the above lines.
I don't think just because you were not born in this country, you are qualified for any special loan programs, government sponsored bank loans or tax breaks, etc., so you can open a hotel, coffee shop, trinket store, or any other business. We did not go to the aid of certain foreign countries and risk our lives in wars to defend their freedoms so that decades later they could come over here and tell us our constitution is a living document and open to their interpretations.
The email wasn't entirely about immigrants. I cut out the parts about homosexuals and racism because, for most of us, those are so obviously wrong and that wrongness has been described by others so eloquently that I won't even attempt to tackle them. It's the immigrant thing that is sticking in my craw today. I seem to see it a lot in these forwards.
What all of these thick-skulled, short-sighted asshats seem to forget is that we are all immigrants. Aside from a tiny, tiny minority, every single person in this country is descended from immigrants. Yes, some of them may have been from England, but I would wager the vast majority did not speak English very well when they washed up on the shores of Ellis Island. I guaran-fucking-tee that three generations ago my ancestors, the Dzbrkyzthyzbytskis, didn't.
The entire reason America was founded was as a freakin' refuge for those who could no longer live in their home country, for whatever reason. Sometimes that reason was religious, but mostly it was economic. So yes, every employed immigrant is taking a job away from an American citizen, but it wasn't that long ago that the American citizen's parent or grandparent was an immigrant himself.
I wish everyone would live and let live. Have some goddamn patience. Yes, it can be frustrating to try to communicate across a language barrier. Imagine what it's like for the non-English speaker. Every word they utter has to scale that barrier before they can be heard.
A short sampling of the immigrants/first-generation children of immigrants who have made this country what it is:
- Benjamin Franklin
- Albert Einstein
- Henry Ford
- Joseph Pulitzer
- Alexander Graham Bell
- Thomas Edison
- Andrew Carnegie
- Walt Disney
- John F. Kennedy
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