Welcome To America, Now Learn Cherokee

The title of this post is about as rediculous as the "English is our national language" resolutions being debated in Congress. There is a lot of talk now about how English should be made our national language, our common tongue, or something else. Why does it really matter if everyone who lives in the USA speaks English? We are a nation of immigrants, and I bet that everyone reading this blog has either a parent, grand-parent, or great-grand-parent who didn't speak English too well.

Obviously, this line of thinking is due to the recent debates on immigration, the same type people who were fearful when the Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Chinese, (fill in the blank) ethnic groups started immigrating to the United States are now scared of the Spanish speakers. Should they be?

English is spoken to some degree by almost all of the people in the United States. Does it really harm someone when the person next to them on the bus is talking in Spanish on their cell phone? Does a TV commercial in Espanol really constitute a national security crisis? I don't think so.

Now I don't think the government should be teaching all classes in school in Spanish, but I don't think they should be running schools either. In this America, it is almost impossible to get to any high position without speaking English. It is almost impossible to do any job without speaking English.

The question we should ask ourselves is not "why don't they learn English" but "why don't we learn Spanish." It never hurts for someone to learn a second language, and most Americans don't know one word of anything other than English. Learning something else, whether it be Gaelic, German, Italian, Yiddish, Mandarin, or even Spanish can only benefit you in the long run.

In the world we live in now, it's too late to say "let's all speak one language," and much more important to speak many.