A recent op-ed in the NYTimes about a view of citizenship and nationality as a wardrobe. A process in which the only signifier of importance is the would be immigrants’ personal feelings. It of course was written by a member of global elite. The spouse British by birth and author American.
The op-ed claim that ten years of being anywhere regardless of status is enough to call a place home. I couldn’t disagree more. Much like the notion that ten thousand hours of effort will make you a genius, nationality and home are not door prizes or union negotiated raises, they are the fullest measure of existence. The blood and toil for a community. The Lost Generation lived in Paris but dreamt of the home they couldn’t return to. This is to say immigrants do become the nationality of their new country but through assimilation. Their rituals and customs must be traded and the ones that remain Americanized like the names on Ellis Island. Everyone will be “Irish” on Friday because the Irish are actually American. The left views this as immoral but I cannot disagree more. That is the beauty of the melting pot you become us and we become you. The new may take attempts yet we have always found a new harmony (with some discord) in each new voice.
Assimilation threatens the playground of cultural tourism that so delights the rich. A liberal purity test that chills freedom in the name of their pleasure. They proclaim the importance of international travel but deny most Americans the wages to experience it. They hold up a system that forces the most desperate to lose everything frequently including their lives for a different poverty while enshrining their privileges for their descendants. Assimilation and wage equality for all workers promotes an unified America. It brings together wider community and bonds beyond those that are skin deep. Despite what the Global Elite says, there should be great pride in being an unhyphenated American. Instead their academic agenda is a deunification process categorizing us as the tribes we left behind. Leaving young citizens without civic lessons beyond identity politics.
We must teach our children of the sacrifices made for them, the flag that flies for them, and how they can carry forward our traditions.
-E.C. Fiori
The Radical Centrists 