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What's your answer to 'This is America, speak English'?

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I haven't been writing much lately for lack of time, but this thing wrote itself spontaneously in one hour. I sent it to the American Thinker and they published it on the following day.

What's your answer to 'This is America, speak English'? Here's mine.

By Oleg Atbashian

I'm signed up with a worldwide questions-and-answers board named Quora, which sends me daily digests of its content in the categories I've chosen: history, culture, and languages. Most of the time, the posts are informative and a pleasure to read, but once in a while, they seem to be designed by trolls with an agenda to sow discord in society, just like what the active measures were designed to do in the pre-internet era. That pretty much describes today's social media anyway — one has to take it or leave it.

Today's digest contained just such a leading question with over a hundred answers that read like a smug, virtue-signaling hate-fest. As an immigrant in this country, I just had to answer it, if not the way the author had intended. I thought the readers of the American Thinker would like to see it as well.

The following is the question and my answer to it.

Q: You are sitting in an American restaurant speaking with a friend in Spanish. Somebody at the next table takes offense and shouts "This is America, speak English!" What is the best way of dealing with this situation?

This is a loaded and dishonest question. In my almost 30 years in America (and I've traveled almost everywhere from New York to California), I've never seen this happen. I speak three different languages fluently, and when I'm with people whose first language is Russian or Ukrainian, it's only natural that we communicate in their mother tongue. If we have an English-speaker at our table, we naturally switch to English. No one has ever been stressed about this very normal behavior. The only memory that comes to mind is the opposite of what the question implies, but more on that later.

No one cares what language you speak at a table in a restaurant, unless you are being too loud or obnoxious in other ways. An exception from this rule would be if you want to start a fight, but then any excuse would do, not just the language. Or if you're Jussie Smollett, trying to perpetrate another "racist" hoax. (If racism were so commonplace in America, why would one have to fake it?)

A frustrated request to speak English may still happen if one is trying to get a service and everybody around speaks another language. Please note that someone's inability to speak English is frustrating not only to the natural-born Americans, but to immigrants from dozens of countries as well, for whom English is the only way to communicate with all the other immigrants, and who often have trouble understanding unusual accents. But even then, most people would try to help with the words rather than chide, which is a mark of a sociopath.

The only time an English-speaking stranger discussed my accent with me was in a New York subway, and it was the opposite of a request to learn English. I was sitting in my seat, reading the cover of a videotape I had just borrowed from the library, which said, "How to improve your English." A young black man with a bass guitar, probably a college student, who was sitting next to me, looked at the cover and asked me, in a yet hard for me to understand accent, why I would want to improve my English and be a conformist to the establishment instead of keeping my cultural identity. He seemed to resent that whole notion, which didn't jive with the artificial concept of multiculturalist utopia they probably taught him at college.

I said I was trying to improve my English so he could understand me better. He said he already understood me just fine. I said he wouldn't be able to understand me today if I hadn't spent years earlier in my life trying to improve my English. Why stop now? Where is the cut-off point in learning to speak a language?

Years have passed, and no one uses videotapes anymore, but I still remember that conversation. I hope that young man remembers it, too, and that it made him think. I know I was right, and the proof is in the pudding: I wouldn't be able to tell you this story if I hadn't extended some serious effort to learn the language.

* * *

If the question in the title was a jab meant to reinforce a stereotype about the supposedly "xenophobic" American conservatives, I can assure you that in my experience, conservatives are more likely to extend grace, patience, and love to a stranger. It is the "liberals," especially those in big cities like New York (where I've lived for 18 years), who are more likely to snap, always living their lives on the edge of a nervous breakdown due to never-ending anxieties, real or imaginary.

What do I mean by imaginary anxieties? Exactly what the above loaded question illustrates: wallowing in fictional negative stereotypes and hating half of the world because of it.

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Oleg, I get a number of foreign-exchange students in my classes. My horribly conservative reaction to hearing their sometimes halting English is to ask where that magnificent accent comes from, and tell them how glad I am that they are here. Most of our students aren't going to do a whole lot of international travel, and I think it is neat that they get the chance to meet some of the outside world.


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Here's one: You are sitting in an American restaurant and you notice the couple at the next table are speaking dog-whistle laden hate-filled systemically racist conservative speech, what's the best way to harass them and drive them away?

Language ain't what it used to be.

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Late November in Sarasota. Walking around St. Armand's. Sarasota has a large population of Jews, Soviet refugees (sometimes both) and Italians, along with indigenous rednecks. I sat outside one of the chi-chi (or is it shi-shi?) women's stores with two other guys doing the same thing -- waiting for wives to shop while we enjoyed the weather. About my age or a little older, speaking a language I didn't know. I asked where they were from? "Belarus. We are NOT Russian." I didn't suggest Russian, but I suspect they get that all the time. Kind of like when you accuse an Aussie of being a Brit. I never asked them to speak English, I just greeted them in English and they responded in kind.

For some reason they didn't expect me to respond in their native tongue. Seemed reasonable.

Been all over the world for work. Know a few words in French and Spanish, mostly curses. Greet people with a smile and say you don't understand the native tongue. Never had a problem communicating, even in places where I couldn't even read the local alphabet. The only time it was ever an issue was a ticket window in the Paris metro when you used to have to pay cash every time. A government worker in a socialist state. Go figure.


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Why are the individuals of loaded questions filled with assumptions voiced out loud, not considered the violator of peace in the American Diner?

It's that Saul Alinsky Rule ability to make vicious/offensive statements to other diners, blame the victim for any response, and move on like a human shark.

When the community of the American Diner is unsure of the division between good and evil regarding what just transpired, moral ambiguity drifts in like a sand dune overtaking the community. Judging the validity of the opinion of a social deviant's actual words to inflict harm and disrupt the peace, as less violent than the answer back, is the worst of human nature Saul Alinsky counted on.

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Just remember, comrades: the Russian word for "good" is pronounced as "horror show"

хорошо.

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There's a TV show, I think on ABC, though I don't know if it's still on the air, called, "What Would You Do?" I've never actually watched it, but I've read about it and seen commercials for it, which are more than sufficient to turn me off. It's sort of like the old TV show, "Candid Camera." They regularly dress up actors as their idea of stereotypical, right-wing, MAGA-hat-wearing knuckledraggers who go out into public and act the way the left thinks conservatives do; e.g., they get offended at the sound of Spanish, or they don't want to serve a drag queen who enters their business, or their son decides to come out as gay while the whole family is waiting in line at Starbucks, etc. Are you going to be part of the solution/revolution and tell these people off and defend the Party-approved victim, or are you going to MYOB and remain silent? Because silence is violence, you know, and you can be canceled and deplatformed for it.

Take away the scenarios that stereotype conservatives, and it's otherwise the sort of social pap we might have had to sit thru back in middle school, usually health class. "The most popular kid in school offers you a smoke behind the gym--what would you do?" (Gee, but I wish my short-term memory these days was as crystal clear as my memories of middle school.)

But you're absolutely right--this sort of stuff as described in Red Square's article never happens. And it's precisely because it doesn't that they have to make it up. Hence Jussie Smollett. Russian collusion. Pee tapes. Christine Blasey Ford. The Insurrection™. Some of it is just pure hate fantasy, and some is just plain dishonesty, because that's their only means of staying in power. Unfortunately, there are just enough people--one born every minute, per P.T. Barnum--dumb enough to fall for it. And full of enough hate and resentment to keep fueling it.

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Red Square wrote:Just remember, comrades: the Russian word for "good" is pronounced as "horror show"

хорошо.

'pelipsky's learning Russian in mythical soul, just can't speak a word. When 'pelipsky resided in Hong Kong, upon learning Chinese was a tonal language, this horned lagomorph from Texazistan kept that hare-lip shut rather than make horror show inflection out of something meant as good.

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Commissarka Pinkie wrote:Some of it is just pure hate fantasy, and some is just plain dishonesty, because that's their only means of staying in power. Unfortunately, there are just enough people--one born every minute, per P.T. Barnum--dumb enough to fall for it. And full of enough hate and resentment to keep fueling it.

Agree.jpg

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Most Equally Esteemed Red Square,

OK, more than "equally esteemed".

I want to thank you for clearing up one of the few things I didn't understand from A Clockwork Orange. Why did Alex call things he liked "horror show"? I thought a horror show would be something that would appeal to him. Something along the lines of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It never occurred to me that it was a Russian word like so many others in the movie.

Red Square wrote:Just remember, comrades: the Russian word for "good" is pronounced as "horror show"

хорошо.

Feeling not so clever in the Current Truth ™,

Red Salmon

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Red Square wrote: but to immigrants from dozens of countries as well, for whom English is the only way to communicate with all the other immigrants, and who often have trouble understanding unusual accents.

I'm from an English speaking nation and am often misunderstood, or not understood at all, because of my accent. I once had a black woman from "the projects" demand that I speak English before hanging up on me.

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Kapitan Kangaroo Kourt wrote:.... I once had a black woman from "the projects" demand that I speak English before hanging up on me.

So the "King's English" evolved to "Obama's Ebonics" and nobody told you?

Clearly this is your own damn fault, and you're a racist. Get with the program and harvest more beets... yo.

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Ivan the Stakhanovets wrote:
Kapitan Kangaroo Kourt wrote:.... I once had a black woman from "the projects" demand that I speak English before hanging up on me.

So the "King's English" evolved to "Obama's Ebonics" and nobody told you?

Clearly this is your own damn fault, and you're a racist. Get with the program and harvest more beets... yo.
Yes, comrade. I humbly admit that I am not yet fluent in Gibberish™ and that's certainly my fault for not suspending enough time to study. Unfortunately, the beet fields keep me very busy so I struggle with educating myself on the nuances of Gibberish™. I will try harder.


 
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