Dear Editor:
I am a little confused. On the one hand, I watch as we, the people of the United States, are broken down and placed into neat little “demographics.” We are placed into nice manageable compartments.
We also are very big, it seems, into another of my favorite words,”multiculturalization.” That is where we, the people of the United States, are once again, broken down into nice manageable little groupings. At least with this practice, they give us a hyphen, as in “Italian-American” or “Filipino-American,” or whatever other group you and I happen to fit nicely and neatly. They sell this idea by saying that we are celebrating our varied heritages and cultures. What it actually does is to highlight and perpetuate what makes us different, each from the other and one group from another. The problem with that practice is that we are creatures who are more secure with those like us and more wary of those different. Additionally, America became the greatest nation and society ever on Earth by the assimilation of all into one. America rose to its grandeur by recognizing the dignity of every individual man and woman and melding those millions of individuals into the commonality of Americans. Over these recent years, however, there has been a very active and predominant practice of separating us rather than bringing us together. And as long as we continue this practice, we shall continue to be a country of small groups of persons who, gradually, have put aside our common bonds as a nation and as human beings.
Then, though, I am a little confused because those same “demographers” choose to lump together into one large grouping those to whom they refer as “Hispanic” persons. They lump together those persons, who, by geography or language or heritage or culture, have some relationship to being “Hispanic.” More recently, they have used the term “Latino” for that same purpose. I find that especially distressing. Those persons who are called very generally “Hispanic” are being denied indiviudal dignity and respect. Is Cuba not different from Spain? Is Puerto Rico not different from Ecuador? Are persons from the Dominican Republic not as worthy of their own heritage as those from Haiti? Oh, excuse me, are they simply “Central-Americans?” Each and all of these persons has an individual heritage, each one worthy of distinction and celebration. Then, and of greatest importance, is their recognition as Americans.
We did not refer to the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the Poles as “Europeans” when those wonderful people first emigrated to these shores and built this America. Yet today’s America wants to “categorize” us, the people of the United States, rather than to bring us together to continue to “form a more perfect union.”
It is unfortunate that it takes an incident of unimaginable tragedy to make us more aware of our commonality and of the need for togetherness. Our strength and our future lies in the assimilation of the worth of every aspect of every individual into a common magnificence. We Americans are not mere numbers, and if we continue to be treated as such, we soon enough shall be mere statistics. Rather we are the People of the United States. No compartments. No hyphens.
I am reminded that evil occurs not by itself, rather only when good people do nothing. Good people, do something.
Tom Hart