14th
Just another reminder why Obama is smarter than the average American, and thus, must be the next President of the United States
In my latest working venture, I bartend downtown in an impacted area of a city that is overrun by over-caffeinated shoppers, sugar-saturated brats, slow-footed old people and dozens and dozens of tourists. Many of these visitors (especially during the summer) are from other countries, with the overwhelming bulk of the ones that I’ve met coming to town from somewhere on the European continent.
Euros and their Euros love San Francisco, and how their money kicks our money’s ass right now.
What astonishes me most about these folks visiting from England/Italy/Greece/Lichtenstein/Spain/Macedonia is one common theme that you just don’t find in any part of the United States: they are incredibly multilingual and fluent in many regional tongues and dialects.
I was most recently blown away by a lady on vacation from Italy that understood and was magnificently fluent in Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and oh yeah, English too. She was a walking, talking dictionary and thesaurus and encyclopedia (she was very smart) in six different and distinct languages.
Meeting her made me wonder, “why do Americans have a hard enough time with our own slanguage that we force down everyone’s throat?”
And by some incredible telepathic mind-reading ability, presidential candidate Barack Obama could sense my concern over our languishing ability to languidly express ourselves. He said this during a recent campaign speech in Georgia:
“I don’t understand when people are going around saying, ‘We need to have English only.’ They want to pass a law ‘We want English only.’ Now I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this. Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English. They’ll learn English. You need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual. We should have every child speaking more than one language. It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup, right?”
Obama hits the nail on the head yet again—fearlessly challenging the status quo of lazy-ass America and urging us all to improve ourselves and the coming generations by making sure that we can say more than “I’ll take that in Super Size, please.”
If we ever get tired of the European continent whooping our ass economically, and this will happen with Asian and Latin American nations soon enough as well, we have to improve our competitive edge in every way possible. Mastering a language that we did not grow up with is one of the most basic, simple and practical moves ever to improve ourselves. If you can communicate more easily with more people, how can that possibly ever be a bad thing?
But the American response was more dumberer than dumbfouding, and very predictable. Here in America, we like everything in English and English only! Keep it simple and stupid for the masses, please. Y si usted no lo quiere, usted acaba de volver a México! O Italia! O Frances! O España! O Alemania!
