When in years to come Americans look back on the night of May 18 in Miami, those residual beings of the North American Continent will see that at that moment the United States first became a 'colony' of the world.

On that night a mere 13 people - the Metropolitan Dade County Commission - voted to repeal a 13-year-old ordinance declaring English the official language of local government. And the United States began a journey that of becoming no longer an independent and sovereign country.

While we talk soberly in Washington about the crushing need to simplify government and cut the deficit that is choking the nation, Dade County will spend millions of dollars to translate county documents, court records and other complex papers into Spanish, Creole and French and God only knows what other languages that will be demanded.

Nor was the vote of the newly elected, racially and ethnically mixed panel made with any real pretense of humility in the face of the terrible problems the country faces. 'This is not a question of language but a question of respect,' Miami Beach Mayor Seymour Gelber was quoted as saying. And many on the commission, including Hispanics, laughed when 'Anglos' at the meeting complained that their very way of life was being destroyed.

Well, I don't personally know the Miami Beach mayor, but I know what he really meant about the vote being a 'question of respect.' It is akin to what the old First Ward aldermen in Chicago meant when they cunningly redistricted wards and somehow managed to get dead men up on their feet to vote. Those 'dose an' dem' guys were at least honest - they didn't pretend they wanted to get the keys to City Hall to write poetry.

What will now happen is clear in Dade County, where citizens and noncitizens of Cuban and, more recently, Nicaraguan origin now predominate. County jobs will go to Hispanics. Spurious Hispanic groups, often with no membership but driven by guilty foundation money and publicity, will demand more and more. Payers of high taxes, whom they call 'Anglos,' have been moving out, leaving the county to become even more hopelessly Third-Worldized. Now the syndrome will worsen.

What this will mean in our larger society (dare we still use the word 'nation'?) is even more depressing. This vote is the bellwether of larger agendas being pushed by ethnic and special-interest activists with ever greater vigor under the sympathetic Clinton administration. It is an agenda of linguistic division of the country, of bilingual education and ballots, of noncitizen voting, of illegal aliens being counted for redistricting and being included in the national health plan and, eventually, the death of citizenship in America as we know it.

'It is clear that ... we are

allowing to be set up not only

a parallel Spanish-speaking

'America' but a tragically

splintered America that will

continue to fall further

and further behind...'

Two examples only of the scope of the linguistic problem alone in New York City, students are being taught in 81 languages, including Kpelle, Nyanja, Twi, Gurma, Ewe and Cham; and in Los Angeles County, only 54.6 percent of those 5 years and older speak English at home.

It is clear that - because of the unquenchable ambition of the activists who gain through division - we are allowing to be set up not only a parallel Spanish-speaking 'America' but a tragically splintered America that will continue to fall further and further behind the unified, disciplined countries of the world until it becomes just a piece of land that people with no commitment to it scavenge over.

Former Sen. Eugene McCarthy, author of the compelling book A Colony of the World The United States Today, presciently sees America, through its own indifference, as culturally colonized. 'Culture colonialism is being imposed through demands by newly empowered immigrant groups for acceptance of their native languages and cultures as coequals with the language and culture of those who built the society,' he has written. And this is 'the very hallmark of colonialism.'

Two last observations

If you happen to think that these ambitious activists are somehow well-meaning, think of their constant negative use of the word, 'Anglo.' As a matter of fact, most English-speaking Americans and even most white Americans are not 'Anglo-Saxon.' This is as deliberately derogatory a use of a word as is 'nigger,' 'kike' or 'honky.'

Finally, let us look where the impetus for 'Spanish first' is coming from. Almost all of the foreign-born in this country have come from impoverished, failed and/or violence-torn countries. Most often they were desperate to come here, as are untold tens of millions around the world.

But now they repay the adopted country that helped them and even saved them by refusing even to learn its historical language, which held the nation together. I seldom use the word 'shame,' but there are times when it alone has the right ring. ;