A Diverse Opinion About Diversity

By Burt Prelutsky
Monday, January 21, 2008

Recently, I heard from a guy who claimed that squirrel tasted just like chicken. Some days, I swear, I get the idea that everything’s supposed to taste like chicken. But it brought home the fact that what we eat, as well as what we think, is often more a matter of geography than of anything else. Frankly, I wouldn’t care if it tasted like chocolate ice cream, I’ve never had squirrel on my plate and I aim to keep it that way. As with frogs and snakes, there are some things I regard as food and some things I’d prefer not to think about at all. And that’s how I want to keep it.

So it will probably come as no surprise that I am not a champion of diversity even though I am aware that the word, itself, has taken on sacred qualities in certain quarters, along with such words as liberal, progressive and Hillary. Leftists mainly enjoy using the word as a club with which to bash conservatives over the head. Suggest that you believe that America’s traditional values and culture trump those of other countries, and you can expect to get whacked.

For a couple of hundred years, foreigners have been flocking to the shores of this most welcoming of nations. They would bring along their art and music along with their cuisine, but they adapted their ways in order that their children and their children’s children would acclimate and be full-fledged Americans. There was a reason, after all, that America was nicknamed the Great Melting Pot.

But somewhere along the way, there was a sea change. Now we have that oddest of strange creatures known as the dual citizen and we have millions of people living here who apparently have no particular loyalty to this country and are being encouraged to retain their own language and their old ways. “Press one for Spanish, two for English” has become commonplace. Teenagers who have never even set foot in Mexico, Salvador and Guatemala, demonstrate in our streets while carrying foreign flags, and we’re all supposed to respect them or be labeled as bigots and xenophobes.

American citizens who are being taxed to death to support illegal aliens are called racists if they object to footing the bill for health care and education for millions of freeloading ingrates who insist they’re only reclaiming land that is rightfully theirs.

On top of all that, our kids are being brainwashed in their schools into accepting that the only truly evil society on the face of the earth isn’t North Korea, Iran, China or Syria, but their own. They’re taught to accept that Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, aren’t gangs of butchers and terrorists, but simply freedom fighters. They are carefully taught that Christian and Jewish symbols and traditions are oppressive, but that they mustn’t be judgmental when it comes to burkas, beheadings and female mutilation.

By their lights, tolerance is the greatest of all virtues, but only so long as it’s not tolerance of anything American.

I accept that our ways wouldn’t suit everyone in the world. In some places, after all, cock fights and bull fights are the norm, just as the execution of homosexuals in Iran and the eating of dogs in parts of Southeast Asia are apparently part of their disgusting cultures. So while I may not approve of these loathsome activities, I figure they can do what they like, so long as they stay where they are. In fact, staying where they are strikes me as being one hell of an idea.