Answering the phone WAS: Licensing snafu

[Fairlight]

Y'all catch dis heeyah?  Brian K. White been jivin' 'bout like:
> > Why did you take this private?  People seemd to be enjoying the thread
> > even though it was OT.

I'm enjoying it, although politics is one of those dicey things to talk
about publicly.  :-/

Someone raised the issue of accents.  I have to comment.  Both sides of my
family came over--all four grandparents.  Two from Hungary, two from
Czechoslovakia.  All pre-WWII.  My parents were first-generation
America-born in my families.  

Now...my mum's family, to my knowledge...I don't think my mum or anyone
in that family speaks the native tongue--at least I never heard it used,
even when my grandmother was alive till I was 14.  My father's side, my dad
and all his siblings (and definitely my late grandfather's siblings) all
speak fluent Czech.  It was spoken around the home, and it was spoken in
conversations when us kids were around when I was little, when they wanted
to discuss things privately.

NO trace of an accent, even in my late grandfather or my grandmother on my
dad's side, and none on my mum's side at all.  At all.  Nor in any of their
kids.

So I have to wonder why we have this whole accent issue that has been
"dignified" with the official label "ebonics", which I consider no more
than slang.  That's just one "accent", though.  I also have to wonder why
people can't lose the accents of other languages, though, be it Spanish,
French, whatever.  I had a -Communications- professor at university that
was from Pakistan.  Nobody could understand him worth a damn.  I keep
waiting for this one weather personality on local telly to get fired.  I've
been waiting for it for several years now.  Common practise in broadcasting
was to learn and adopt a neutral to midwestern accent, period, no matter
where you worked.  She insists on this really annoying southern twang that
just grates.  But I mean, c'mon, my grandparents -immigrated- from east
bloc countries with slavic language backgrounds and lost all traces of
accent.  Why can't all these other folks?

Which got me thinking about this whole "cultural embracing", and John's
comments about being -an American-.  Which got me thinking about how in the
old days, people like my relatives came over with the express purpose of
coming, staying, and -being- Americans.  Assimilating.  Nowadays, it seems
like we get a -lot- of people coming in from other countries to utilise our
"educational" system (one of the sloppiest money can barely buy, but better
than elsewhere in the world), or utilise our economic system by getting
jobs here.  But their intent isn't to assimilate, and it's not necessarily
even to stay long-term.  It's to get an education and take it back home and
make a killing in their field (medicine, IT, etc.).  Or it's to support
their wife and who knows how many kids back home, shipping most of their
paychecks back.  It's to blatantly use us and then disrespect us elsewhere
in the world.  I find it ironic that in some areas it's a status symbol to
have been educated Stateside, while in the same breath they bash our
country for almost everything else.

Seems a lot to me like we're a country that started off as a good, helpful
neighbor, and ended up being the world's doormat.

As for special interest groups...ohboy.  Don't start me. :) The Cosby
comment I did find interesting.  I was really heartened when he took the
black community on in one address he made.  Someone had to say it.  But
like...the gay community.  I have a gay friend I met on YouTube, and we've
talked about that whole sort of political scene.  It's sad, because they do
the same things, but it's even harder for them.  They're ostracised from
regular society, but it doesn't do to be a middle of the road gay person
with no agenda.  You -have- to be militant and stand up and parade and
wear the symbols and such, or the community you're part of treats you as
a pariah as well.  It happened to him, simply because he refused to play
ball with one group's agenda when they asked him for a favour.  He's a DJ
and was going to fill in for someone for an event.  He didn't want them
forcing him into advertising their agenda the way they wanted, and they
dropped him even though they had a capable and quite personable DJ.  I
gotta ask why any group, gay, black, hispanic, whatever, would choose to
define themselves almost exclusively by -one- facet of their life.  When
was the last time you heard someone that wasn't a TV evangelist prattle on
for 2hrs about how great being straight is and how we should be proud to be
straight?

I have a real issue with this, "I want to be treated equally, but I demand
you acknowledge the differences between us -that I personally choose to
embrace and not only that, further enhance-!"  What kind of equality is
-that-?  It's not, in my book.

History is -not- my strong point, and my opinions are just that--my
opinions, right or wrong.  They may even be founded on really lousy
background information, as happens many times.  But I still wonder about
this stuff.  Mostly I keep getting back to, "Why does society continue to
turn a blind eye to the things it should address, and constantly address
things that have next to no consequence?"

mark->
-- 
The latest synth mixdown...
http://media.fairlite.com/Isolation_Voiceless_Cry_Mix.mp3