Just to be brief and to the point, it may indeed be a primary function of elected officials to safeguard and steer the Nation-Culture. And in fact, defacto, this is what they do in their assigned responsibilities; or suppose to be doing. Not doing this wisely, and with abandoning simple demographics can result in Cultural suicide; a death of a culture while applying liberal applications of a strange 'diversity' concoction.
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I submit that the overt violent attacks of terrorist on our Nation are similar to a quiet mass invasion thru our own porous border--i.e. they both can result in loss of our Culture/Nation!
..........................TM7
TM7. I see your point, and I ended up contradicting myself in my own post by promoting shared values of tolerance, liberty and duty as a worthy national culture. I have absolutely no problem with any politician promoting these notions. I just get nervous when they start proposing ideas of culture specific to religion, ethnicity, history or just about anything else that makes one person inherently more worthy than another. That's where Hitler went, that's where segregationists went, and that's where I worry about people going today. What other aspects of culture do you think should be promoted by the government?
My different perspective is probably due to the fact that I currently live in New York City. You will never see another city with so many cultures in such close proximity. Now consider the economic and cultural influence that New York exerts on the whole world. Look at how the whole city came together on 9/11. Once you get past peoples' no BS attitude, they're actually very nice. I've met a lot of people who were born abroad, and many of them have the partiotism of someone who had to make sacrifices to earn their US citizenship. On the other hand, my girlfriend's grandfather felt like he had to change his name when he moved here because it sounded too Irish, which at the time would keep him from getting a good job. How ridiculous and sad does that sound today?
Have faith in the American melting pot/quilt/whatever. As long as we show ourselves to be a tolerant people who place a higher value on hard work than birth, immigrants will continue to embrace citizenship and we will benefit from their economic and cultural contributions.
As for violent attacks, let them come. Al Qaeda can't FORCE us to do anything- that's why they're terrorists, not a real army. Anything we do in response to their attacks is a matter of choice. They aint got enough planes to blow us up. They aint got enough fanatics to occupy a square inch of our soil. They killed 4,000 of our fellow citizens, but we're 300 million strong. The blood of the 9/11 dead feeds the tree of liberty as long as we don't cut it down in their name.
Bo
