Melting Pots, Tossed Salads, and Mosaics

Around the end of the Jurassic Era, when I was in elementary and high school back in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of the classes we were required to take was "Civics," in which we learned about American government and the responsibilities of citizenship. I don't know if such classes are still required (I don't recall my daughter having one), but if they aren't, they need to be, because I don't remember a time in which such lessons were needed more than they are today.

It used to mean something special to be an American. You were a citizen of the greatest nation in the world, the country everyone wanted to come to. No matter what your name was, your religion, your ethnicity, your race, your original home, there was a place for you as long as you were willing to work hard and do your part to build the American dream.

It wasn't perfect, of course. Through the years, almost every ethnic group has suffered discrimination and economic deprivation on its way to the achievement of that mythical American Dream. There were times when you could see signs everywhere with messages like, "No Irish Need Apply," "Whites Only," and "Jews Not Welcome Here." But in the long run, all of those groups persevered and became part of the group called "Americans."

In my old Civics classes, we learned that America was a Melting Pot - a great kettle into which people of every race, color, creed, and ethnic background fell, melted together, and emerged as something new called an American. The Melting Pot helped to get rid of (or at least, to minimize) old prejudices and produce citizens who spoke English and believed in core American values of hard work, tolerance, and civic responsibility.

Sometime during the intervening years, the Melting Pot gave way to the Tossed Salad - the concept of America as a huge bowl into which people of every race, color, creed, and ethnic background were dropped and tossed around to create a salad that preserved the identity of each individual ingredient while producing a pleasing whole. This was the beginning, I think, of the trend toward emphasis on preserving ethnic backgrounds at the expense of the concept of an American identity. We became a nation of hypens: Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and African-Americans, people to whom the ethnic designation to the left of the hyphen was as important (or more) than the American to the right.

And today we have the Mosaic - the concept of America as a image made up of millions of individual pieces, each one separate and distinct, each one demarcated from all the others by its color and placement. In the Mosaic, the color, shape, and location of each individual piece has become more important than its value as part of the whole: one is no longer an American, but rather a Black, a Hispanic, a Muslim, gay or lesbian, or whatever.

In the Mosaic America, many Muslims insist on maintaining a religious identity that trumps civic responsibilities; many Blacks want special treatment to compensate for past discrimination; and many Hispanics want a Spanish-speaking environment in which it isn't necessary to learn the English language that was once the glue that helped hold a wildly diverse nation together.

The Melting Pot may or may not have been the best metaphor for America, but it did manage to make us the Nation of Choice for people fleeing oppression and discrimination elsewhere. Unfortunately, as the Melting Pot yielded to the Tossed Salad and then to the Mosaic, the entire concept of being an American has changed. Nowadays, people stream into this country - many in flagrant violation of the law - and insist on recreating the environments they left behind. The America of toleration and rational action runs the risk of changing to a collection of polarized elements, each insisting on its perceived rights and privileges at the expense of the nation as a whole.

As we lurch through the endless banality and empty posturing of the presidential campaign season, it's worth thinking about what's not being said. The next president will inherit a badly fractured nation in danger of changing from Tossed Salad to Mosaic. He (or she) must be prepared to be the president of all Americans, and to articulate a vision of the America we stand to lose if we lose sight of the virtues and traditions that made us a great nation.

Think about that as you decide which of the mediocre candidates out there deserves your vote. One of them is going to set our course for the next four years, and probably influence it for much longer. I'm old, crusty, and pissed off...I can vent my spleen in my blog and wish for the return of the better days of the Melting Pot. Unfortunately, my beloved grandchildren will grow up in the era of the Mosaic.

And it'll be an era of a diminished America of squabbling bits and pieces, not the great engine of progress and toleration.

And that's sad.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo