Razada said:
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I will not be replying in full. I will outline my argument and then I will leave.
I am a socialist. A humanist.
I do not believe in borders. I do believe in Immigration. I am an economic migrant myself. The idea that if you do not like the country you are in you should go home is ridiculous. I reside in my homeland right now. And I fucking hate this place, I hate the government, I have no pride as to what we do to the world and I believe its high time the ConDem'd government was dragged out of office.
In your eyes does that mean I should be removed from Britain and sent... Where? I have no other citizenship. My family is from here, no other blood unless you track back to the Norman invasion (Or perhaps some Irish Gypsy, we are still investigating that). I am British. Is it my fault that I hate this country? Did I wake up and say "Man, I just hate this place?"
No.
Two bad governments came into power and fucked me over because of my past.
America is a nation of Immigrants. Hating on other immigrants is stupid. So the process of assimilation takes a while when you are inviting a group of people, who face racism on a daily basis, into your country. The issue is not "These people hate America" it is "Why do these people hate America? What did we do?". They are not born to hate the Yanks.
Either accept those who have come to America or accept your nations impending demise. Change the situation for those Mexican immigrants and maybe they will love America a bit more. Cause right now America needs all the friends it can get.
I'm a realist.
The bottom line is that if you come to America, or to any country, and obtain citizenship, you do it to become part of that nation/culture. NOT purely to obtain the benefits.
It's nice to hold to an idealistic philsophy that there should be no borders and globalization, but frankly we're not to that point, nations like the US still need to compete with other nations in order to survive, dominate, and maintain the same standard of living that those immigrants desire. Right now, operating as something of a global charity is part of what has decimated the US economy. On paper it's nice to say "we're a nation of immigrants, and even have carvings saying we'll take the unwashed masses" and we tried that, but in reality it simply has not worked. Just as our philsophy on business and peace at any price mentality has not worked, with nations like China stealing our IPs and Copyrights (like they do everyone else) "lending" us money back to maintain peace so we won't come after them, and building up a military and becoming increasingly belligerant. Not to mention connected issues like our refusal to use "sweatshop" type labour, and as a result getting our butts kicked in the international marketplace by nations that do and can produce the goods cheaper as a result, especially if they are stealing our technology. The point here being that idealism is something that is fine to keep in your heart as an overall objective, but dealing with reality... which is harsh, and real problems have to come first.
Now I *DO* agree with you about the overall need for creating a global unity, and one world goverment for a lot of reasons. This however requires a single world culture and set of rules and principles everyone follows. While a lot of this is going to happen through the spread of ideas... the US is accomplishing it to some extent through the media, as some have said we've conquered more of the world with "Starbucks" and "Melrose Place" than other "empires" have done through direct military means, in the end certain people are just not going to give up their cultures, and govermental independance that they have had for thousands of years, no matter how long the ideas are projected. What's more even many first world nations are so scared of American ideas that they are instating national firewalls for reasons of cultural preservation.
In the end even nations doing the work are going to fundementally dissolve under a global unity. Some however are going to need to be forcibly dissolved or destroyed through conquest and mass murder in the final equasion. As long as you have more than one group your going to continue to have paranoia and various issues, it won't be a one world goverment if there is more than one faction. Closed nations who are based on religion, or those who simply demand independance, or do not want to dissolve their culture into a part time thing before the greater one are going to have to be destroyed.
Now you might ask "who made America god, why does it have to be your way", and the answer to that is simply that noone did, in the end someone is going to do it, and right now we're probably the best choice of the nations who could viably do it. While every nation secretly dreams of being the ones to do this and present the foundation, only a few are in a position for it to be viable. Right now the only other viable alternative with the abillity is China, and their way of doing things would probably wind up being worse than the US as brutal as I'm being due to the amount of racism inherant in their society (which goes beyond anything I've said).
The point is that while your on the right track overall, you have to understand there is no NICE way we're ever going to get to that point. Even if you bring a lot of first world nations together in order to do it, your still going to have to deal with things like the middle eastern culture, the sheer chaos in Africa, the attitudes of nations like China, and other things, all of which can't be reached by ideas or reasoned with through traditional means which is why ideas and cultural media will never do the job alone. After all if the basis of a culture is spiritual (in one way or another) instead of based on reason, you cannot reason with it overall as it's perspective is ultimatly entirely out of context.
These conclusions are not nice and as much as people might deny them for idealistic reasons, the bottom line is "the world sucks, and it's going to suck worse before anything better happens". Even in the best case scenario we're never going to have a utopia.
That said, before anything like that can happen nations like the US need to do what they need to in order to preserve themselves. Our spread of ideals might be powerful, but if we collapse economically due to taking every dreg in the world, and tolerating people undermining our culture from within, we're not going to accomplish crap, and even as
hardcore as changing that might be the alternatives to us are substantially worse.
Likewise as a global unity comes about due to cultural assimilation, it's kind of counter productive to that goal to have people insisting they should be able to be US citizens while scorning the culture to the point of demanding the flag not be shown during foreign holidays.
I'll also be blunt in saying that as much as your situation might suck in the context of what I'm saying, when your dealing with societies and policies you can't set them up based on every individual exception. In the end your fundementally correct that I'm saying you should either get with the program where you are, or I have no objective to you becoming a landless global exile who will probably die unsupported. That's not NICE, and of course I wouldn't want it to be me (nobody would) but you do have to look at the big picture as much as the people on the bottom hate that.
Of course then again you also have to remember that I myself have become dependant on social security due to being forced into retirement in the US. As a result the economy needed to support social security and the people who are a drain on the infrastructure are a concern to me. I have increasingly little sympathy for people who do not support the US using things like our educational system, and the drain that represents on the tax dollars. If there are enough of these kids who identify as Mexican to the point of being offended by the US flag for it to be a concern where this issue has been recurring every year, removing them, irregardless of where they might go, does wind up saving money due to not paying for them. Granted it's a tiny thing overall, but it's all these little, stupid things that we do that contribute to the US's problems. We've literally broken what has perhaps been the strongest economy the world has ever seen up until this point by trying to prop up the entire world. It's great to be generous when you can afford it, but we can't afford it right now, and have trouble supporting the people who WANT to be Americans and are part of the culture, without dealing with people who can't even show respect for the flag of the country they are drawing benefits from.
Sure, you might be able to get a higher standard of living from another nation, but your hardly entitled to it. Now should we ever acheive a global unity and one global nation/culture that will change by it's very nature. What standrd of living we wind up with though depends largely on how many people die during the unification, and whether or not the new order finds a way of imposing and regulating laws to control population growth in comparison to the amount of resources we have to support that population... but that is an entirely differant discussion.
I'm done myself. In the end we're going to have to agree to disagree. I just felt I should respond to your parting comments even if I figure it doesn't make much differant in the context of the dicussion and what we are disagreeing about.
