There is so much that is so wrong that it is impossible to comment on everything that the left has caused to occur in this formerly wonderful United States of America. One of the most recent is the chiding (one of the very few things Obama is good at) by our president to the victims of the recent devastating weather events in southern Louisiana to “make sure they don’t engage in racial discrimination.”
Just imagine: you have been through a terrifying climate paroxysm, trying to protect yourself and your family, a situation against which there are few defenses, and you arrive at the other side of the cataclysm seeing that you have lost everything – every object you and the other members of your family had collected and cherished has been destroyed, and even if you had flood insurance, most of that which you loved remains irreplaceable. So what does your nation’s leader do? He doesn’t even address your situation because he is on his prolonged luxury vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and he certainly doesn’t pause from his daily golf games with celebrities to come to witness the life-changing calamity that has happened to you and so many of his fellow Americans. Instead, Obama sends a 16-page government “guidance,” led by the Justice Department, warning “Louisiana recipients of federal disaster assistance against engaging in unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin, including limited English proficiency,” (italics mine).
So Obama not only figured out a way to enforce his long-attempted effort to destroy America’s great gift of a single language, which is English, by the way, he is now attempting to punish Americans who speak only our national language! The leftist mantra of “never let a crisis go to waste,” is at work again in this instance, where Obama and his minions are taking advantage of the incredible struggles of the southern Louisianans to survive in the aftermath of this devastating storm to further divide us as a people, only now by language.
There have been many ways in which America has been blessed, and one of the greatest has been the gift of a single language. Many nations have not been given this gift, as you can see from the tales of the havoc that has resulted with just one or several languages being part of their national story.
Look at Canada for instance, who basically came close to war on several occasions over whether French or English would be that country’s national language. Parts of Canada having been initially settled by the French over two centuries ago, and parts of Canada having been settled by English speakers since the same amount of time, this conflict has been ongoing for quite some time. It finally settled into the French-speaking province of Quebec taking on the rest of Canada, which fell into English-speaking habits, and Quebec has been, and continues to be, quite warlike on occasion in keeping the French language alive as a societal necessity. Such Gallic efforts became so stringent on occasion that a full-blown separatist movement, i.e., secession, based on French being maintained as that province’s language, was thought to have emerged as a popular force. Largely to placate the French speaking Canadians, an all-encompassing Official Languages Act was enacted which established Canada as a bilingual nation. Besides costing the government, i.e., Canadian taxpayers, many billions of Canadian dollars in signage, documents, etc., in Canadian schools and universities, along with hospitals, roads, airports, maps, markets and bank displays, among many other venues and entities, this has brought Canada no closer to being a totally bi-lingual or bi-cultural society perhaps, as one wag mentioned, “Except for maybe poutine and famous Las Vegas transplants Cirque du Soleil and Celine Dion, English Canadians haven’t exactly embraced French culture.”
As a semi-interesting aside, neither, it seems, has the motherland of Francophone Canada. I remember when living in France I went to the Champs Elysee to try and see a movie in English (just about the only place in Paris you could see a movie in English with French subtitles, rather than its being dubbed). I found a French Canadian movie I wanted to see instead, and went in only to discover that the movie, which featured French Canadian as its language, had been subtitled in Parisian French. The poor French Canadians couldn’t get a break, either from their old or new world.
For another such example, just look at the Basque country in Spain, where language is the cause of much conflict; also in the Alto-Adige in Italy, where more than a century after this area’s becoming part of the nation of Italy, continuous friction results over where German or Italian should be the predominant tongue; regard the canons in Switzerland, where the constant battles are being fought over the predominance of French German or whatever other language is in favor at the time; look ever more at the sections in Belgium so hostile to each others’ firmly entrenched languages, primarily French and Flemish in this very odd excuse for a nation state. These are just a few examples of the disruption caused by the lack of a single, unifying, language.
Belgium is perhaps the most extreme international example of such conflict at present, where a ‘battle cry’ was heard being shouted in the nation’s federal parliament, just some short months ago, which was “Long live free Flanders, may Belgium die!.” This followed the rather tempestuous most recent collapse of the national government. You see, Belgium is a sort of pretend nation, as it was put together in the fairly recent past by bringing together disparate nations, like Flanders, Wallonia, and other bits of other nations. There is little fielty to the actual nation of Belgium, as one can see in the following quote by a mayor of the Flemish town of Lennik, just south of Brussels: “I’m Flemish, not Belgian. There’s no loyalty to a country called Belgium. There has never been a country that has lasted so long in conditions like this.” Another Belgian (for lack of a better term) political official said in French “”We’ve been arguing about this for 30 years. I’m not sure we’ll ever find a solution.” As another individual familiar with the current situation in Belgium also said:
“Language is the fundamental flaw at the core of Belgium’s existential crisis, taking on the role that race, religion, or ethnicity play in other conflict-riven societies. The country operates on the basis of linguistic apartheid, which infects everything from public libraries to local and regional government, the education system, the political parties, national television, the newspapers, even football teams.”
This is what the left currently in charge in the United States of America wants for us as it continues in its destruction of our formerly wonderful, cohesive nation.
There were those in southern Louisiana who took great offense at the actions of the Obama administration in receiving this “anti-discrimination lecture from Washington, D.C.,” as residents said, “…locals struggled to rescue, house and feed their neighbors.”
“Everywhere you look you can find black folks and white folks loving on each other, helping each other through this crisis,” Louisianan Rod Dreher was quoted as saying. Mr. Dreher referred to “the guidance as a long bureaucratic memo issued by the Department of Justice and many other agencies of the executive branch overseen by He Who Cannot Be Troubled to Leave Martha’s Vineyard.”
Unfortunately, this particularly offensive move on the part of our Obama-inspired federal bureaucracy, the rejection of a single, unifying language, will go a very long way in ensuring our national destruction.
Susan Smith brings an international perspective to her writing by having lived primarily in western Europe, mainly in Paris, France, and the U.S., primarily in Washington, D.C. She authored a weekly column for Human Events on politics with historical aspects.. She also served as the Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Children, Family, Drugs and Alcoholism, and Special Assistant to the first Ambassador of Afghanistan following the initial fall of the Taliban. Ms. Smith is a graduate of Wheeling Jesuit University and Georgetown University, as well as the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France, where she obtained her French language certification. Ms. Smith now makes her home in McLean, Va.