Speak English, Dammit!
Words spoken to my heart Allan!
I was in Jr. High when the laotion boat people statred coming over(’82-’83) me thinks- and though they had some classes that were “bilingual"- for the most part you could have a conversation in ENGLISH with them. At that time, some of them had only been in this country THREE MONTHS!!! The Laotians were grateful to be here so they wanted to become part of “America” right away.
The current crop of immigrants don’t feel like they owe their adoptive country ANY thing. They do feel that they’re entitled though. They don’t even need to speak English to become a citizen-otherwise why do we need ballots in different languages!
I’ve met US born children of -mostly mexican-immigrants who can’t speak English any better than their parents!
When singer Gloria Estefan gave birth to her daughter-Emily- some years ago, she said that she would only speak spanish to her daughter for the first five years of her life because she wanted her to be in touch with her culture or some nonsense.
The US took Estefans family in when Castro came to power, allowed her to grow-up in freedom and opportunity, made her a millionare MANY times over, and yet Estefan thought that it was important to immerse her daughter in CUBAN culture?!!! My grandfather came to the US from the Jewish Pale(Chernigov, Ukraine in his case)- when he was 3. His family some yiddish at home but everyone also learned English. that was then. GRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!
*Steps down off soapbox. Storms off*
BARBPosted by Annoying Little Twerp
09/14/2004 at 07:18 AM
How can we blame the current crop of immigrants for feeling entitled, thats how a lot of native born feel? Hell even the multi generation American families are haveing trouble with the language.
Bet you thought I was going moonbatty? Nope this is the biggest reason to cut this bi-lingual crap. English is still the spoken by the majority and it should stay that way. Adult illiteracey although a terrible thing is not an excuse either.
When bi-lingualism threatens the already existing base language , we got problems.
I don’t get it science has adopted English as a comman language, so has engineering, medicine and air traffic control world wide. So what’s the problem at Home?
Beside it pisses the French off…
Posted by Ric
09/14/2004 at 08:48 AM
Mon Dieu! Les Englais pissez moi off! Oui!
-- John Kerry
Here I thought you were going to make a crack about the Georgia girl not speaking English either OCM…
Question? Were they required to conduct business in English? Many of my wifes co-workers in financial services at Shands at UF are hispanic, but they must conduct business in English. They may only use Spanish if the patient does.(I suppose on their break time they can speak anything they feel like, stopped by to vist the wife one day and it seemed they all used Urbonic on break, go figure).
Our Emergency Service people still conduct business in English. Of course when I was ParaMedic and also while I was a road deputy we carried the handy little Spanish for Emergency Services book and preprinted cards for use with the deaf.
Posted by Ric
09/14/2004 at 01:42 PM
When I was in Canada last year-my sister-in-law is principal harpist with a major canadian orchestra, US citizen AND a Bush supporter to boot-I saw that EVERY thing was printed in English and French.
EVERYTHING and EVERY PLACE is REQUIRED to be bilingual! When we crossed back into the US, I almost got out of the car and kissed the ground out of gratitude. LOL.
BarbPosted by Annoying Little Twerp
09/14/2004 at 04:20 PM