America is slipping through our fingers. The America of the '50s, of my boyhood, is no more than a nostalgic memory. Twenty years hence, will the America of the 1990s seem idyllic compared to the murderous multicultural trailer park that then constitutes our disintegrating nation?
It was one of those soft-news stories that The New York Times assumes will charm its readers but to which normal people react with less than elation.
"Ramadan Becomes an Extracurricular Subject," read the headline. "As new immigrants swell the numbers of Muslims in New York City, the rites of ... Islam's holiest period have quietly seeped into the culture of the city's schools."
At John Jay High School, administrators announce the onset of Ramadan on the public address system. Apparently it is only official recognition of Western religion that threatens church-state separation.
Don Feder is a nationally syndicated columnist. This item is © 1997 by Creators Syndicate and is reprinted by permission. "Islam is said to be the fastest-growing faith in America," the Times discloses.
How we are enriched by the quaint customs of newcomers! On March 29, a little publicized federal law will go into effect that criminalizes the practice of genital mutilation of women under 18, a practice prevalent in 28 African nations. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are 150,000 girls and women of African descent in this country who have been or are in danger of being so maimed.
In Lincoln, Nebraska, two Iraqis are under arrest for marrying sisters, ages 13 and 14. An account in Newsweek notes such marriages are common in Moslem countries. Since we are informed that America must now adapt to immigrants (instead of the reverse), perhaps we should abolish our culturally insensitive laws against statutory rape.
More than 50,000 members of the Caribbean Santeria cult have immigrated to South Florida, where they are enhancing the state's diversity by sacrificing chickens, goats and other small animals to voodoo rituals.
Whenever I write about immigration, indignant communications pour in accusing me of stigmatizing today's immigrants in the same way that my xenophobic precursors degraded and dehumanized earlier waves of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants.
Equating immigrants of the 1890s and the 1990s is a soothing myth. The old immigrants actually had things in common with the American majority of their day.
The aforementioned groups were European. Two were Christian; the third practiced the religion from which Christianity sprang. All came from societies that respected law and had common concepts of justice, liberty and individual responsibility.
The Jews gave the world the Bible. Irish monks preserved Western civilization during the Dark Ages. Italy was the embodiment of the Renaissance.
Over 90 percent of new immigrants are non-white. Many come from caudillo cultures where corruption is pervasive. Most have a mañana work ethic. Their customs and traditions are as alien to our own as sushi to kosher cuisine.
Increasingly, they see themselves as a bloc (people of color - pink doesn't count) arrayed against white Americans. In California last year, Asians - our model minority - voted by a 55 percent margin to maintain the state's system of anti-white discrimination.
Due in large part to our open-borders style of national suicide, America's European population will shrink from 73.6 percent today to 52.8 percent in 2050.
What kind of America will your children and grandchildren inherit - the multiculturalists' delusion of Diversity Disney World where a rainbow of smiling faces celebrates their differences, or Rwanda with high-tech machetes?
I'd rather read about voodoo rites than have my next-door neighbors practice them. I'll willingly forego more ethnic restaurants for telephone operators who speak my language. The knowledge that America's fastest-growing religion is one that oppresses all others wherever it achieves power does not comfort me.
In 1993, the Sierra Club published a coffee-table book called Endangered Peoples covering such exotic topics as the Tuareg of North Africa and the Amazon's Yanomami tribe.
Neglected is a group on the brink of extinction that actually made a contribution to civilization - the Americans. As for the Tuareg and the Yanomami, they'll all be here in a few years. TSC
In a special series on America's changing population - changes due to rapid mass immigration - Jonathan Tilove of Newhouse News Service asked if a dominant culture is needed to bind a country. The question is an important one since by the year 2050 there will be no majority ethnic group in the United States. As Tilove writes
By the middle of the next century, a nation con-ceived by white people and for white people will be, according to the best estimates, less than half white. As white skin or European ancestry dims as a beacon of American identity, belief in the so-called American creed is left shining as the single generally agreed-upon expression of that identity. But will a shared faith in freedom, justice and opportunity be enough to bind a nation no longer in the sway of its historic racial majority?
These are questions of race and national identity that will be contested in both the public sphere - in battles over what holidays to celebrate and how history should be taught - and in the individual hearts, minds and psyches of Americans...