MORGAN HILL, CA (KGO) -- The Morgan Hill School District is backtracking on a high school principal's decision to send five students home for disciplinary reasons Wednesday. Their offense: wearing t-shirts bearing the American flag on Cinco de Mayo...[BTW] many other Live Oak students were wearing red, white and green -- Mexico's colors.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If this were an aberration I wouldn't bother. But stuff like this happens all the time. I'm guessing the principal wasn't a La Raza-type ideologue (though no one knows because the principal won't talk to anyone in the press). Probably just a Neville Chamberlain type wanting "peace in our time" and willing to send home three students who hadn't started a fight rather than risk "trouble" with all the students who regard themselves as Mexican.
Morgan Hill is over 500 miles north of the Mexican border here in California, BTW.
As I'm writing this, a caller on a local radio talk show is defending the principal's actions, saying that if the students' motives were "to taunt" then it was appropriate to order them to change clothes or go home. The caller didn't say anything about all the Mexicans at the school (it has a large Mexican population) wearing the colors of the Mexican flag.
Another caller expressed anger and contempt at these three students and approval of the school officials' actions, calling the talk show host (Ron Owens, an avowed centrist) "naive" for defending the boys. The caller claimed that if the principal hadn't sent the boys home there could have been a fight between Americans and Mexicans on campus.
Okay, suppose the students' intentions were, to quote one school official there, "incendiary" and that they intended to taunt all the Mexicans at the school.
Would you as a school official then order the students to get rid of their American flag-bearing clothing? Turn their T-shirts inside out? I wouldn't, but many would. Possibly a majority of school officials in districts with large Mexican student populations, though that's just a guess based on the observed spinelessness of school officials I've known (I used to teach high school).
How do you get inside the head of someone like that? These are folks whose principles don't include patriotism. Not much at least.
I once had many interactions--on a NYTimes comment thread, before they discontinued everything but comments on specific articles--with a high school teacher, an Anglo, in a Colorado school district that was heavily Latino. He took the Latinos' side completely and gloated over the coming minority status of Anglos in the United States--said we had it coming. He would have voted to turn the Southwest back to Mexico. You could say he was strongly anti-patriotic.
But as I said, I doubt that this was the high school officials' mindset. They're probably just people who aren't patriotic, but are focused on their immediate situation and on being "sensitive."
And I'm guessing a significant percentage of Americans--maybe 30%--prioritize being "sensitive" over being "patriotic," so they'd support bending over backwards not to offend Mexicans living in America on our dime, on the day they celebrate their loyalty to Mexico--Cinco de Mayo.
I'm referring to them as Mexicans rather than as Mexican-Americans out of deference to the wishes of a majority of people of Mexican descent living in America, as expressed in a recent Pew survey, to be regarded as Mexican, even if they have American citizenship.
And yes I'm sure that most people who place such "sensitivity" atop their priority stack are Democrats. But I'm equally sure that a majority of Democrats would not, and that a lot of Republicans use our patriotism for demagoguic purposes, which is the opposite of true patriotism.
And I shouldn't have to add that the Republican leadership strongly supports illegal immigration, though they pretend otherwise. Their actions--as opposed to their worlds--during their recent reign clearly revealed their intentions.
Both parties have their own flavor of complicity in this sorry business.
Viva la reconquista, huh?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Update: on El Seis de Mayo (¿Es un chiste, no?) hundreds of estudiantes from this school ditched class and went marching around town waving Mexican flags (not an American flag in the bunch). See, they are patriotic...loyal...and all that.
Just not to this country.
"I think they should apologize 'cause it is a Mexican heritage day," Annicia Nuñez told KNTV. "We don't deserve to get disrespected like that. We wouldn't do that on Fourth of July."
3 comments:
this is 'madness'; no hyperbole here.
(interesting too because i just watched the dow plunge 900+ points)
i find it really difficult -no, impossible- to begin trying to understand that 'we the people' are just going to give america to the mexicans, and that this is how the great american experiment ends.
where is the grassroots uprising? are 'we the people' just... asleep? ignorant beyond even my own cynical estimate?
America's immigration policies fail as a humanitarian measure when we let people in who don't like us. They are just not going to be happy. After all, we stopped kidnapping people and bringing them here against their will nearly 200 years ago!
For every person that we let in, we must keep out so many more. Find the ones that like us and that love the Stars and Stripes. They are the ones a humanitarian policy would favor.
If they don't cry with joy when they see the Stars and Stripes -- send them home and exchange them for someone who really appreciates being here.
"It was a quintessential American scene — except that the language of choice was Spanish."
soccer, that great american pastime
grassroots uprising any day now. right?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/sports/soccer/07soccer.html?hpw
Post a Comment