I'm getting so sick and tired of stories like this one. It isn't especially any worse than the thousands like it we've seen in the last couple of decades, but even the headline ticked me off: "Explosion of diversity sweeps U.S., census shows." The story explains:
From South Carolina's budding immigrant population to the fast-rising number of Hispanics in Arkansas, minority groups make up an increasing share of the population in every state but one, according to figures released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.
"This is just an extraordinary explosion of diversity all across the United States," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "It's diversity and immigration going hand in hand."
That is just extraordinary crap, and anybody who talks like that doesn't have a clue about what real diversity is. This has always been a nation of minorities. Diversity has made us, and how we've dealt with it has defined us. All these people are talking about, really, is skin color, and that's the least interesting, most superficial kind of diversity there is. (No, language doesn't really enter into it; how are we going to be scared by big, bad Spanish when we've absorbed just about every language on the planet?)
These diversity nuts will change the country, destroy it, in fact, if we pay attention to them. Instead of cutting through all our superficial differences and building a common bond of American culture, they want us to celebrate our separate subcultures and turn our melting pot into a salad bowl.
Now, if someone can patiently explain to the rightwing dummy why a Hispanic kid in California and a black kid in Chicago and a white kid in Aboite -- who are mostly all educated in the same kinds of public schools and who are all caught up in the same popular culture -- are more "diverse" than an Irish immigrant fleeing the potato famine, a Jewish immigrant escaping from Russia and an Italian immigrant trying to get away from the Cosa Nostra, and I'll take it all back.
