Will Multiculturalism Destroy the United States? A Seventy Year Perspective

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When I was born in the early 1940's, Amercia was still fighting World War II to protect our ability to determine our own destiny as a nation and continue to live under our own Constitution. We did not want either Germany or Japan to change that. Our threats were external. Now it is internal threats that could possibly destroy what Germany, Japan, and Communist Russia couldn't. Those external threats hit a country with a common culture. Today that is almost gone. Most people in the USA used to at least consider the Bible authoritative as to what is right and wrong, even if they belonged to no formal religion. Most kids were raised going to church and Sunday School or whatever the equivalent was in their religion. Most people were raised Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish. Those religions differ in theology but they have a common moral code based on the Ten Commandments. The strategy over the years by the opposition has been to tear down the authority of the Bible and the Commandments and cast us into a state of moral relativism. That eventually led to "if it feels good, do it." Now that has become "If I think something is right, then it is right for me." That is now turning into every person deciding what is right and wrong, but not just for himself. It's turned into "If I don't like what you say, you should not be allowed to say it." Then it became, with Antifa, "If I don't like your demonstration or protest, it's OK for me to attack and physically harm the protesters to stop the protest." How did we get here? The enemies who want to destroy our Constitution and us with it took over our education system and infiltrated our churches. The wolves put on sheep's clothing and became pastors, priests, Congressmen, judges, local government officials, and especially school administrators, teachers, school board members, and curriculum writers. I remember back in the 1960's we had a youth pastor who was teaching us to question everything we'd ever learned in Sunday School. When I got to college, the interfaith cultural religious center where all the mainline denomination campus chaplains hung out was teaching students to question their faith rather than defend it. Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, which held to the authority of the Scriptures was the organization providing Biblical apologetics training and discipling Christian students to reach out to other students. The denominational pastors were the ones asking "Did God really say?" Those were the very words that Satan used in the Garden of Eden to get Eve to eat the forbidden fruit that caused the downfall of mankind. When I was a child in the 1940's and 1950's, my first educational experience outside the home was in a public preschool where my mother taught. Her boss was a card-carrying Communist sowing seeds of destruction in the public education system. Other Communists did not necessarily identify themselves as such. They just kept planting seeds. When I hit elementary school, we started each day with The Pledge of Allegiance. Jehovah's Witnesses did not have to pledge and we respected their right not to. We sang the patriotic songs that still mentioned God and his care for our country. I wonder if they still sing "My Country Tis of Thee" and all the verses of "America, the Beautiful" anymore in public schools. We even sang religious Christmas carols like "Silent Night" and "Joy to the World" in public school Christmas programs. We really did. Our principal was a Christian. The Superintendent of Schools went to my church. Most of my teachers also went to some church. Once a week we had a program called released time when students whose parents requested it were bussed off-campus for religious instruction in their own faith. I wonder if that's still happening today. I've not heard anyone talk about it. I might mention that I live and was raised in California, now known as a blue state being run by Progressives. In the 1990's I was selling curriculum used by public schools. As the years went by I could see the changes in what was being taught. Diversity was now a virtue, and multiculturalism was following right behind it. This was supposedly a good thing, and parts of it are. I have nothing against pictures in textbooks and other books having illustrations featuring people of all races. I think it's good that children see pictures of people who look like them when they read books. I also think it's good that children with different ethnic backgrounds meet people in their textbooks and recreational reading that come from their backgrounds. What I object to is the door this opened for teaching that all cultures and forms of government are equally good. I firmly believe all people are created equal and are equally loved by God. I do not believe that all governments are equally good for the people that live under them. I think many of the people who live under oppressive and cruel governments might say the same thing. I do not believe all religions are equally true. I believe in freedom of conscience and would not curtail free religious expression in the United States unless that expression was harmful to others. (Honor killings, cruel and unusual punishments, etc.) I would not want any religion, including my own, to enforce its own religious law (think Sharia) in cases where it conflicts with the laws and Constitution of the United States. It's OK with me if certain religions have religious courts that determine religious things and excommunicate people from their fellowships. It's not OK with me if they can then order to have that person killed in my country because he left their religion. It's not OK with me if a church protects molesters among its clergy by hiding them in new locations where they are not likely to face civil prosecution. It's also not right for the federal government to make a private citizen who owns a private company to force that person or company to provide services that will violate that person's conscience unless not doing so will cause actual harm to another person. This is especially true if the services are widely available elsewhere. No one should be forced to bake a cake or cater an event when not doing it would not harm a person and at most would hurt his feelings. The point is never the cake. It's making a person violate his values for yours. And the person wanting the cake always seems to choose the known Christian baker, not the Muslim baker down the street. Today illegal immigration is bringing in millions of people who want to come to America for financial reasons, not because they value our culture and freedom. They then want American culture to conform to what they had at home. They want us to print ballots and driver's license tests in their languages, even though citizens are supposed to be required to learn English. They want to bring a religion with a system of laws in conflict with our Constitution and have us accept it into our legal system. The public schools and the major media tell us that diversity and immigration makes us a stronger, better nation. I disagree. And I'm married to a legal immigrant. A few decades ago most immigrants were legal and most followed our laws and conformed to our culture in public life. Official documents were still in English. Immigrants had been vetted and most were coming to escape death and persecution after a war in their homeland or to start a new life in a freer land with more opportunities than the country they came from. They learned English, understood and desired our Constitutional form of government, and wanted to live under it. They brought valuable skills and became part of the "great melting pot." They celebrated their own religious and cultural holidays with others from their culture and sometimes invited their other American friends and neighbors to join them. I have nothing against legal immigration. But allowing unfettered illegal immigration can only weaken us. If immigrants aren't screened for infectious diseases and terrorist connections they can cause immeasurable damage to our country. People have not been vaccinated against some of these diseases that could cause epidemics here if brought in. Even smallpox, which has been almost eradicated here, could return. There's also the economic burden millions of illegal immigrants bring us. California has more than its share. I hear more Spanish than English on the street and in the stores. I'm sure some of it is from legal immigrants. But I also know our welfare systems are overburdened, as is our education system. We won't even talk about the crimes committed by the illegals in our sanctuary state. Something is wrong when illegal immigrants have more rights than American citizens. What used to be a melting pot is now a stew. Instead of combining the strengths people from all cultures bring and uniting around the American Constitution and its values, too many immigrants are now transporting the values of their home cultures and trying to plant them here. They stick to their own communities as much as possible instead of assimilating to American culture. They do not mingle more than they have to with people outside their own cultures and get to know them. Instead they want to live in a cultural enclave. That is the danger of the multiculturalism that is being promoted as a virtue by those who would like to weaken our culture and destroy what makes this country unique. America is about people of all cultural backgrounds working together to build a strong America based on our Constitution. It's not about our cultural, ethnic, racial, and now even gender factions fighting each other. We need to start having real conversations with each other so we can relate to each other as human beings with some common needs and desires and see how we can work together to solve common problems. George Washington said that our form of government could only survive among a moral people. It will not survive in a culture where everyone is his own morality and many cultures vie for supremacy. We need to go back to being a melting pot where we combine the best of all represented cultures and the talents of a diverse people. If we keep becoming more of a stew of competing cultures where we emphasize our differences rather than our common beliefs, America will eventually be conquered by a culture that is united.