Divided We Fall

If you've read my much, you probably know one of my mantras is it's not about race, it's about culture. And in addition, multiculturalism amounts to no culture at all when carried to its logical conclusion.

And we've heard over the last few years how by the middle of this century "white" will be in the minority in the USA. That excites activists. And in and of itself, it doesn't bother me, either.

What I worry about is the loss of the major ideals of Western culture. Western culture has adopted and entrained lots of things from many cultures where they fit in and improve our ideals. But what we've seen during the latter half of the last century is a wholesale rejection of all that we as a culture had become. A lot of this had to do with wrestling with the ugly spectre of racism, especially the huge upheaval in the 1950's and 1960's. No culture is perfect. But ours has been very good at self-correcting.

However, much like AIDS, this self-corrective urge seems to have developed into an auto immune disease, and we've got a good 20%-30% of the country that's ready to throw the baby out with the bath water and start something new. Hence the success of the Hope and Change™ movement. We've got another 30% of the population that's fighting to keep some continuity and cohesiveness in our culture. Which leaves the middle 40%.

Most of the middle 40% are decent folks who just want to do the right thing, but they're not really paying a whole lot of attention to what's going on. By and large, they're not racists, they're for freedom of religion, they don't want to lay waste to the planet. And a good portion of them love God and country. But they don't spend a lot of time learning how things outside of their own specialties work, and they turn to "experts" when it's time to make decisions that affect things outside of their sphere.

These "experts" are generally chosen and presented by the media.

And a large proportion of people in the media are infected with that autoimmune disease. Or more accurately, they are our defense against our cultural weaknesses, but they have been attacking their own culture as if it were some foriegn threat to itself. Rather than isolating what's bad and modifying it or purging it, they are attacking the structure itself.

Ok, you know sometimes you start down a road and then some other side thought leads you in a different direction. That, I think, was a worthwhile trip... but it's not what I started out to say.

I read an article in the NYT today that's actually kind of encouraging in two ways. One, it's nice to see somebody in the media thinking and taking note of something besides the numbers that support the progressive narrative ... but what else the numbers might be telling us if we look at some others that put it into context. Somebody in there is "thinking outside the box", to use the buzz-term. The other is what the numbers actually say.

Deep inside a data dump by the Census Bureau last week was a startling racial projection: By midcentury, the United States will be home to 80 million more white people.

Never mind, for a moment, that the bureau also predicts that Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American-Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will constitute a majority of the population by 2042. The number of people who say they are white is projected to rise by about two million every year.

At that rate, even while the Hispanic and Asian populations expand enormously, the proportion of Americans who identify themselves as white will barely shrink, from a little more than 79 percent, to 74 percent.

When I was growing up, we talked about two races in America. White, and Black. Blacks were those of African decent with lots of melanin in their skin, and Whites were everyone else. I never thought of, say, a Japanese person as not being "white". Or a Hispanic. Or an American Indian. To me, they were all White. And it was because all of the ones I knew shared my cultural idioms and values -- at least for the most part.

And that's what this guy goes on to say, basically.

Race and ethnicity, says Joel E. Cohen, professor of populations at Rockefeller University, are really about culture, not biology. Categories contrived by bureaucrats and politically correct committees can be confusing and skew the results.

It's a worthwhile article, and I recommend you go read it (it's linked above in this post where I first mention reading it).

We're not as far down the road as much of Europe is, completely fragmenting American culture, but we've been on that road for a while now and the cracks are starting to widen. This is a good argument for an official common language and to stop supressing the public expression of our common cultural traditions ... which, sorry, are largely based in Christianity. This doesn't mean everybody has to be a Christian, go to church, observe Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving ... but it does mean that we shouldn't bend over backwards as a nation to accomodate those who are hostile to this culture.

And we shouldn't be shy about defending it in the newspapers, at work, and with force when it is called for.