Melting Pot?

The United States is as much a melting pot as it has been at any time in it’s brief past. The people living through the mass immigrations of bygone years established homeland communities, which allowed marriage to like thinking mates from like thinking families from the homeland. People in these enclaves found comfort in the shared problems and solutions to being in a new country. Enclaves existed for each ethnicity and most immigrants shunned other immigrants just as the whitey Americans shunned all of them. It takes years to overcome and accept outsiders, but as children mingle and make friends with outsiders, acceptance begins.

My children are far more accepting of outsiders than I am because of their greater exposure to the various ethnicities. It is not wrong or right that the older generations cannot be as flexible in understanding as the new generation. The next generation will think the previous was inflexible as well and this continues for each successive generation.

Interethnic marriages seem queer to the old because they still hear the echo of their parents and grandparents extolling how wrong it is. The echo fades with each new generation. The dirty, conniving Cubans, Mexicans, and Indian/Asians we complain about today are the Slavs, Italians, Germans, and Irish of our ancestors.

The Melting Pot lives.

We all love the varied foods that each culture brings with it. As a child, my mother made Mexican rice, which was Minute Rice with tomato soup mixed in. Today we have fabulous Mexican restaurants and I know what Mexican food should taste like. How about the French, Italian, Indian, Mandarin, Tai, Cajun, and German restaurants we all enjoy, they transplanted from other cultures and have changed part of the American culture. Now people take trips to see German Villages, Italian and Slovak festivals because those cultures assimilated into America. Today only remnants of the old enclaves remain since they gradually integrated into America. America is more politically correct today because we works with many different peoples on a daily basis and we are actually aware that we are no better than they are, just different.

The changes each ethnic group brings are subtle and filtered through American society until all accept part. You see we really do try to adapt to each other but it takes time