Okay. I got a disturbing and at the same time hilarious e-mail from my dad earlier today that included pictures from last weekend’s “Patriot Rally” in DC. The pictures you may be experiencing now, tell a lot about what runs through the minds of people who don’t seem to know any better.
As with any movement, spelling is paramount. If you believe in something enough to put it on a banner, please run your word choices through spell check prior to committing it to signage. Otherwise, you come off as, oh, I dunno, a moron–which is NOT actually spelled with an “a”.
You know what I find most interesting about all this anger-mongering that’s going on in silly Anglo-esque America? It’s the fact that the people who claim most to be ‘American’ and ‘patriots’ and what not, seem to have absolutely no idea about actual American history.
They loooove America, but they seem to have no idea how America came to be. The fact that America was formed by settlers of other countries, I mean, come on. The fact that we now have high fashion at all, certainly didn’t come from the brilliant fashion minds of the Puritans.
The fact that we each can enjoy a slice of pizza, ‘The Colonel’s orginal recipe, and even our annual Thanksgiving feasts, certainly didn’t come from those that floundered onto Plymouth Rock all those moons ago. Hello?
The fact that we have anything interesting going on at all, is all because America is uniquely American. That means that a whole bunch of people came here from all different places to escape the oppressive nature of where they were before.
These immigrants, as they have been called for some time now, mixed together (sometimes not all that amicably) to create a whole new culture that has been called “a melting pot” and what we can say now is American. Even our so-called English isn’t actually English. It’s a blend of languages and dialects mixed in a base of British that we have painted over and over our culture until it can not be recognized as anything other than American–ask any Brit.
The clincher here is our American gem–The uber American Statue of Liberty–you know that super tall green lady with the crown and the torch that stands as the symbol of this country? You know her? Well, she’s French. She was made in France, by a French artist type. The model used as the face of that super tall green lady that stands as the symbol of this country, was also a French lady. The irony is that we all know how the French feel about folks who don’t speak French. We can only gander about how they feel about folk who claim to speak “American’ but can’t spell America to save their damned lives.
America was born as a safe haven. It has thrived since 1776 because we were able to come together as a unit, from where more homogeneous cultures couldn’t hack differences. As Heidi Klum has been known to say, “either you’re in or you’re out”. And so folks who couldn’t bare being told what to believe, what to wear, who to worship or how to make their living, got on a boat and set sail for here. America. ‘The land of the free and the home of the brave’.
Somehow, probably because our educational systems are so piss poor, a lot of our most “patriotic” Americans seem to have missed that memo. And have become assholes. They seem to think and have passed on to their kinfolk that to be in America, one must subscribe to the same homogeneous thinking that caused their ancestors to depart from where ever they were orginially from to begin with. Name someone who was born here that can say emphatically their ancestral ethnicity without mentioning a country other than America. Everybody who lives here, was born here, and will die here ain’t orginally from here– besides the people that were here before the boats came (Read: Indigenous folk). Sorry.
If your forefathers were slaves, your ethnic kinfolk are most likely African from any number of countries (yes, even if you claim an island). If you consider yourself European, your people are most likely from Ireland or England, Italy, France, or Germany. If you consider yourself Latin (I’m going by language similarities here, not actual geography)–Spain, South America, Mexico, etc. Lest we forget about Middle Easterners–who are Africans by some design. Also, there are Russians, Asians. The list goes on for days, weeks, years and centuries. The point is, any body who says “oh, I’m Irish or oh, I’m Greek or Oh, I’m martian” when asked about ethnicity and before the hyphen American (i.e. Italian-American, African-American, Middle-American, Stupid-American, etc.) has no right to dictate what makes one more American than somebody else based on anything Rush Limbaugh can conjure in his utterly fucktarded dome.
America was at first a concept of freedom of speech, language, religion, education and possibility. It later became a country bound by ideas that were created and founded by immigrants. That’s the tall and the short of all of this. Our American forefathers were immigrants. That means, they weren’t from here either.
America will only continue to thrive when so-called patriots stop wearing the American flag on their hats and start getting it into their heads that America is, was, and always shall be a melting pot of culture, ideas, religion and in some cases, fashion.
These same patriots should also learn how to READ the language they seem to be so passionate that everyone else should speak. If only so they can actually understand the fine print on our symbol of our freedom. Until then, folks who are our guests here, and speak languages other than American English, get a big ginormous pass.
Here’s the fine print some folks may have missed (The bronze plaque, located in the Statue of Liberty exhibit on the second floor of the pedestal, is inscribed with the sonnet “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus):
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The moral of this story? Yet, again, I have one: New Rule– If you can’t spell it, you can’t say it and if you don’t know what a word means, you ain’t allowed to use it. That includes this word: American. Thank you for reading this. I salute the divinity in you. Be ye blessed and make sure you subscribe to my blog! Blessings -e-