Culture Blindness

Are we Americans one culture or many? Are we objectively seeking to consolidate or to maintain a segregated social-scape? Let's look at neighborhoods. We'll define a “non-American” culture as one that chooses not to adapt (but simply to cherry pick) American language and law.

We'll have to make a distinction between citizens whose civic behaviors fit within the boundaries of the Federal Regulations, State laws, and Municipal ordinances, and those who don't.

Is it possible for a subset of immigrants from Italy to create “Little Italy” on one side of an American city and install the culture of Sorrento? Of course, if the behaviors of those Italian-Americans don't break American laws. What about language? How will the immigrants understand American law? That's the answer to the requirement for all to understand the English language.

Can 1500 immigrants from the Middle East, followers of Hezbollah, define a local cultural zone in Detroit, Michigan and adapt as American newcomers? Can they qualify for citizenship and carry on lives honoring their Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S.? Can 20,000 Vietnamese immigrants settle in a locality and adapt? Can Somalians? Of course. The test has to be based on law abiding behaviors.

Cuisine and religion don't matter unless they are in conflict with American law. Homesteads and other dwelling places don't matter so long as they conform to local codes of health and safety. In all of these caveats, though, language matters, because an understanding of American law matters.

Sharia Law conflicts with state and local laws in every jurisdiction in America. Common law in some other cultures (punishment, child abuse, women's rights, confiscation of property, etc) is at odds with American law. Immigrants must understand American law, and they must understand that enforcement is a societal imperative. Dual systems of law cannot exist in America.

Some regulations extend certain privileges to citizens while they are in their own homes or on their own property, but these privileges are not sweeping, they are specific (like the castle doctrine). The certain privileges do not include abuse or honor killing. They do not include injury, theft, or sedition.

We send people to represent us because we believe we can be accurately and effectively represented. We put enforcement strategies to work so our rules can be monitored and honored, and so lawlessness can be prevented or confronted. We agree that enforcement of the rule of law is a good way to maintain our peace loving existence.

So our laws must be laws of the people, and they must be enforced. We live in a country where there is one culture that applies to every man, woman, and child. It is the American law and order culture. It must sweep through every town and it must be absorbed by every person within our borders. It must be practiced as accurately and precisely as each person can do. In little Italy and in Detroit and in every geographic place in America, the American law and order culture must be upheld and honored by every person, every family, and every community.

How will we help every recent arrival to the United States learn and understand his or her responsibility to live within the American law and order culture from day one? How will we create the understanding essential to meet this cultural imperative from the first second spent and the first step taken by a guest on American soil?

E. Slater

image sethkravitz.com