¿Como se dice “exclusion” en español?
Though a sizeable portion of the Kansas population could answer that question, you’d have to wonder how many of those people are in the Kansas Legislature.
Here in the state of Kansas, the State Legislature is in the process of enacting a bill that will make English the official state language.
It’s funny because it didn’t really seem that English had stopped being the language in which all legal documents were printed, almost all business took place and public meetings were held.
So why is it that we need to declare English as our official language?
It’s simple. We’ve had this wave of immigrants from down South, and they don’t always speak English.
Kansas is one of 22 states that has not declared English as its official language. Our only neighbor left is Oklahoma.
In 1998, Missouri passed a bill declaring it as an English-speaking state.
In that piece of legislature, it states that Missouri “recognizes that fluency in English is necessary for full integration into our common American culture.”
What is “our common American culture?”
It used to be called a melting pot.
Does that mean it’s a conglomeration of different cultures coming together, or does it mean that we take people from all over and turn them into the same thing?
The statement being made here is that we don’t mind having Hispanics in our state as long as they try their hardest to become your average white, middle-class contributor to society.
We’re forgetting that the basis of American philosophy is the coming together of different peoples to make one big multicultural society.
However, it seems the state of Kansas has been overlooking American political precedent.
In 2005, Kansas passed a statewide ban on same-sex marriages, but oddly, there were no homosexual couples getting married in the state of Kansas beforehand.
In this state, we’re watching our government pass laws that put the nail into the coffin – “Yep, Hispanics, homos, anybody unconventional, we’ve never given you full rights before, but now, it’s in writing. We ain’t got to do nothing for you.”
And all this from the home of prohibition and intelligent design in place of evolution.
It’s as if our state legislators are trying to make a mockery of our homes on the range.
The state government is passing laws that blatantly discriminate. We, the original Kansans – after we killed off the natives – take full advantage of our own civil rights but don’t want to give other people theirs.
One of the arguments for an official state language is that Hispanics will benefit financially from speaking English, as it will allow them to have better jobs.
Hispanics must realize that learning English has benefits, but there is no need for us to tell them they must learn English. In the true capitalist American way, we – white America – have decided that money and financial success is more important than culture. With an ever-growing Hispanic population, the Spanish language is becoming more and more common. We see in this state emerging bilingual newspapers, businesses that function in both English and Spanish and a number of solely Spanish-speaking businesses.
Why is it they have to learn English when we won’t move a finger to accommodate the immigrants that most of our ancestors once were? Unless you descend directly from those English speakers who got off the first ships, odds are your ancestors were once oppressed for not speaking English. However, after a generation or two, they eventually did, and they, too, melted into the “American” mold.
The problem is that projections have shown that two generations from this one will live in an America where a majority of the citizens are Hispanic. Gasp! A predominantly non-white America? How is that possible?
The fact of the matter is that the whites in this nation can’t do anything about the emerging Hispanic population, no matter how much they hate it.
The nation is socially conscious to a point that we can’t repeat what we did with American Indians.
It turns out we condemn genocide these days.
The mistreatment of blacks came into ill favor after several centuries.
Maybe with this racial minority, we should try something new.
Maybe, we should try to include and accommodate this group in American society, which is something we should continue to try with the others, as well.
Though this concept is completely foreign to Americans, there is a number of nations with more than one official language.
Wouldn’t that be progressive and socially conscious to have a bilingual state?
It seems like an easy concept. But then again, the Spanish language isn’t as hard as we make it out to be, either, and we won’t learn that.
Exclusion is “exclusión” in Spanish.
However, its opposite is “inclusión.”