[Peter Brimelow writes: Exactly seven years ago, on September 11 2001, Peter Gadiel's son was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. He would have turned thirty this year. As I said in 2007, I now think there's no point in writing anniversary reflections on 9/11—nothing changed; America's elites didn't really care; they all just got on with their various agendas. Nevertheless, to Peter, and his family, and to all those still suffering from the attacks and their martial aftermaths, we extend our continued commiserations.]
If you graduated from college in the late 1960s to 1970s, you will remember that many of your fellow grads quickly learned that their four years of college had little value in the job market unless they'd gotten their degrees in science or engineering. Thanks to the record numbers of new college grads looking for their first jobs as a result of the post World War II Baby Boom, Bachelors degrees in history, English, foreign languages or other arts subjects were as common as dirt and just about that helpful.
Many a baby boomer with a Bachelor of Arts found himself working as a waiter or shoe salesman with no prospect of utilizing his college education anytime soon.
There were of course some exceptions in this bleak picture. Boston was faced with an influx of immigrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. To deal with the Spanish speakers swamping the public school system, in late 1970 the Boston School Committee (= board of education) decided to introduce a new concept in educating recent immigrants: bi-lingual education. Rather than putting the new immigrant kids into the classrooms with American kids and having them learn English rapidly, as had been traditional throughout our history, they would be segregated in separate schools staffed entirely with Spanish-speaking teachers and administrators.
Proponents claimed that this new curriculum would be more effective in encouraging assimilation, while at the same time alleviating the stress children would feel about being "different". As a result, if you happened to be a new college grad with a degree in Spanish, a job was yours for the asking.
My late wife Ellen, in her last semester of college in the fall of 1970, was one of the many undergrads facing the reality that her B.A. in Spanish was unlikely to lead to paying employment. But suddenly Boston schools needed Spanish speaking teachers by the dozens—and needed them immediately. So off to work she went at a public school named for a Puerto Rican composer, run by a principal from Puerto Rico.
As the grandchild of immigrants Ellen was excited at the prospect of helping immigrant children become English-speaking Americans, continuing the tradition that had enabled her immigrant family (and mine) to take full advantage of the opportunities available in America.
It didn't take long for Ellen to be disappointed. She soon learned that the true purpose of the program was not to teach the kids to become English speakers and not to help them to assimilate into American society. The intent of the staff and the program was quite the opposite: to prevent the teaching of English and maintain the non-American identities of the children.
At the outset, Ellen had actually tried to teach her kids English. But she was firmly put in her place, being told that "the private foundation funding this 'experiment' [does] not want any deviation from the Spanish-only curriculum". She would comply or leave.
After three semesters of watching her kids being directed to perpetual isolation and minority status as a result of this program, she found a job in Cleveland where the private foundation behind Boston's segregationist policies had not yet bought control. There she could teach her students English.
(An interesting part of her Boston experience concerned the school's principal. This lady had a Spanish last name, but she Anglicized its pronunciation so it sounded exactly like a common English noun. The first, and only, time Ellen pronounced the name according to Spanish rules of pronunciation the principal told her quite forcefully that only the English-sounding version was ever to be used again. Thus the principal, while making sure her charges would never assimilate, was making damn sure that she wouldn't suffer the same fate.)
Well, this was 1971. We just thought this program was an isolated example of a few crazies at the education department at one of Boston's colleges using some vulnerable ghetto kids as guinea pigs.
However, hindsight has shown that, as Cold War diplomat Dean Acheson entitled his memoirs, we were "Present at the Creation". What we were witnessing was the creation of a radically new and different political order. This was among the first implementations of what we now recognize has been a decades-long strategy, a "Long March" to create an America radically different from the one that had existed before. The goal was to destroy the American melting pot and weaken American national identity by splintering the nation in as many ways as possible; by ethnicity, by religion, by national origin, by language, by degree of democratic heritage or the lack of it.
And all this was done under the radar—without a vote of the American people.
In the thirty-six years since Boston in 1971, that policy has succeeded beyond its creators' wildest dreams—and beyond the worst nightmares of the rest of us.
Today the United States is divided as never before. Reunification is less achievable than we ever believed possible. Where once people who immigrated to the United States did so determined to become Americanized, if not in the first generation then certainly in the second, now we have millions who arrive completely intent on remaining different and apart.
Thus we have second and third generation U.S. citizens whose primary, or only language, is Spanish. In Kansas City, Hispanics sue the Catholic Church when it requires English-only in a school, a policy implemented to prevent harassment of students who speak only English. (This of course is just desserts for the Catholic Church which has been one of the main promoters of the invasion of illegals).
In the disUnited States of today, we have second generation Moslem immigrants who express approval of the mass murder of almost three thousand Americans by their Moslem co-religionists, and who demand that Americans' First Amendment rights be curtailed to prevent "insults" to a person who is their prophet but no one else's.
Millions of aliens voluntarily come to the USA do so not with the intent of assimilating but instead with the expectation that the nation and its citizens must accommodate to them, and to their cultures.
They believe it is their right to retain their language to the exclusion of English. They demand and receive election ballots in their languages, as well as driver's license manuals and testing; and public education, in languages other than English extolling the virtues of their cultures, nations and even their religions over any known in the United States prior to Ted Kennedy's opening the floodgates of unrestricted immigration in 1965.
Thirty-seven years after Boston decided use its public schools to destroy the melting pot, Sen. B. Hussein Obama, Democratic nominee for president, tells Americans we should learn Spanish because millions who come to our country, often illegally, refuse to speak English.
And Republican nominee John McCain attempts to legitimize the linguistic balkanization of America by exalting the fact that Spanish was spoken in his home state of Arizona before English—neglecting to mention the fact that the people who spoke Spanish were a minuscule number of Europeans who had no racial or ethnic connection with the descendants of Mexican and Central American Indian peoples who are now invading us.
Certainly, back in 1971 neither Ellen nor I understood that we were Present at the Creation. But creation implies destruction of what formerly was.
And now we all are witness to the destruction of America as it was—and its re-creation according to the designs of that private foundation behind Boston's public school segregation experiment.
Peter Gadiel (email him) is president of 9/11 Families for a Secure America. His son, 9/11 World Trade Center victim James Gadiel (North Tower, 103rd floor), was 23 at the time of his murder.
