Me talk pretty one day, no excetions

Posted on March 17, 2008 by Reading on Walden Bookstore

Crestwood
They don’t talk so good over there. But me sure they will learn to talk good one day. Reading on Walden Bookstore.

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One Response to “Me talk pretty one day, no excetions”

  1. Lamont B Dumont, on March 17th, 2008 at 5:43 am Said:

    Well, there’s the obvious shot that is just too easy, so I’ll leave that for another.
    In addition, there’s the quite likely possibility that Mayor Chet has an ancestor or two who may not have spoken English upon arrival of our fair shores. My dad grew up in place called Bayway, one of those neighborhoods where a new foreign language is spoken every few generations. On his first day of school, 5-year-old Joe was amazed that he couldn’t understand anyone. Fortunately, his teacher knew Polish and taught my dad English. There were no ESL programs, no accomodations. (I’m not saying that was a good tradition we should still be observing.)
    Ah, now it’s time for the revisionists to say “But OUR ancestors came over and learned English quickly, not like this new crop.” Wrong! When I was a boy, decades after my dad grew up there, we’d visit my grandparents, still in the old neighborhood. The stores had signs in Polish, usually with translations below, people spoke Polish on the streets. The black mailman learned Polish over the course of his career just through daily immersion. Yes, my grandparents learned English to a sufficient extent, and used it as necessary, but both of them spoke Polish as their first choice to their dying day.
    Bayway has new languages now, but the dynamic is the same.
    Why is it that the descendents of old immigrants are the harshest to new immigrants? Immigration has strengthened our nation more than it has weakened it. If you want to get mad at someone about our schizoid immigration policy, go after the Republican Establishment that has done some “triangulation” on that topic that would make a Clinton blush. The source of our immigration problems righ now are not the immigrants; it’s the combination of draconian laws, in place as a sop to fools like Mayor Chet, which we fail to enforce properly so another Rupublican constituency (bidness) can have cheap, tractable labor.
    We need a rational, consistent, cohesive, enforceable immigration policy that serves to strengthen the nation, not the partisan interests of a particular party.

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