Skip to main content

Coming Together Uneasily

I vaguely recall speaking Norwegian to my Great Grandmother,
who never learned much more than "Hallo!" in English.
Before I could spell "Hello", I had forgotten more Norwegian
than my Great Grandmother had learned of English.

Later, when I went to college, I took a semester of Norwegian,
and that stuck to me like everything else academic did:  it didn't.
It was not until I was a college teacher that I asked to sit in
on Norwegian language courses, where I began to understand
some of the rhythms of my own peculiar English speech.
Then I lived in Norway a couple of times, and even taught
in a college in Lillehammer, in lame Norwegian, but in Norwegian.

As a child of an immigrant, and a grandchild of other immigrants--
my mother having been born in Washington State--I heard
about Lutheran churches that still, or very recently, conducted
church services in Norwegian, sometimes regularly, sometimes
as reminders of what they used to do regularly.  Later, I even
attended one of the latter, somewhere, and was amused by
the old-fashioned, long-preserved, sometimes regional Norwegian
the preacher used, and even more curiously, learned how
old-fashioned and fundamentalistic the religion itself was.

In the Twin Cities today, in October 2011, the old-fashioned
Archbishop of the St. Paul diocese is about to announce
a massive overhaul of the parish distribution of the Catholic Church.
There is every good reason for having to do so.  The Archbishop
is a fierce defender of a view of Catholicism that is almost
anachronistic in the world today, except that it is surrounded
by a catechetical and patriarchal and sexually hamstrung moat
so deep and wide and polluted that it manages to protect the castle.

Inner city churches are dying:  urbanism does things to one's mind.
The suburbs are growing:  suburbs do things to one's mind, too.
Wherever there are Catholic immigrants, the Church is strong.

Today, in October 2011, the Archdiocese of St. Paul conducts
mass in nine languages.  Lutherans were largely German and
Scandinavian.  Catholicism is much more widespread.
The Catholic Church in America once had to decide whether
it would be a German- or an English-language church.
It decided, or drifted into, being an English-language Church.
Like every other immigrant group into this country, eventually
everybody young enough to have time to learn English did so.

The demand by our political neanderthals and social conspirators
is that we must insist that only English be used, if you want to belong.
That is an ignorance of what naturally happens that is so mindless
that it beggars the mind!  It just happens!  It almost always happens!

I don't think it is just political expediency that fuels "English only!".
It is also a humiliating ignorance of history, a blindness to what
is happening all around, and a fear for what is going on that
requires something to lash out about:  a society in transition,
and economy in transition, a world coming together uneasily.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...