I have been thinking recently about our lot as a culture, and how we view the people who come to live here, especially how they cope with being here over time. What happens to them? People change, their beliefs and attitudes change over time. When I say, “over time,” I don’t mean Monday to Wednesday, but generationally. The Korean American kids I used to work with are so American they take it for granted and speak English. Their grandparents come here sometimes, thin and short from adversity, and stand next to their six foot tall, well-fed grandsons, and it’s striking, the change from old world to new.
I saw a little of this change again tonight, ordering a burger from a chain restaurant. A Muslim girl in her 20‘s was off work and talking with a friend, a co-worker who was also off. The easy guess was that this other friend wasn’t Muslim, wasn’t much of anything, putting her young proud face out to the world after saying “you want fries with that?” for 6 hours. I know the first girl was Muslim because she was wearing the head scarf, but without the full garb her mother probably wore. She was not selling halal food, but hamburgers and chicken strips. It probably would drive an Imam crazy, just like a child of an Orthodox Jew would drive her parents crazy selling dairy and meat in one bag. But it’s what we do in America. If I were to mentally tally the people I see at work, most of the patients are Christian or not much of anything. We occasionally see a Mormon, a Muslim, a Hindu or a Buddhist, but they are the infrequent exceptions.
People come here with big ideas and crazy beliefs and devout faiths, and like the friend of the Muslim girl, we show them other ways, over time. Most of us speak English. Most of us are still in a majority category where we lump together our faith and ideas in a bag with a box of fries and we call the bag “American.” My grandparents probably spoke German at home but spoke English out in public to “be American.” My wife’s family has a funny story where an ancestor, a Jensen, came to America and wanted a more distinguished name for his people, a stand out name, so he changed the family name to the outlandish American name of “Johnson.” Do you want fries with that, Mr. Johnson? “Ya, sure.”
What intrigues me just as much is thinking about the future. We have exported America around the globe. McDonald’s in Manchuria. Coke in Cairo. In Air travel and other global pursuits the common tongue is English. Some countries (Japan comes to mind) are more American in some ways than we are. This will wax and wane, but the Americanization of the world is ongoing. This probably scares the daylights out of the old world. The grandchildren of the immigrants will grow up, become even more western over time. They will return to the old world, some of them, disciples and prophets of business, new faiths, new cultures and even the American government. And they will show the old neighborhood a thing or two along the way. Elon Musk, a South African, will bring satellite cell phones to the whole world, from here! And as the saying goes, then you will see something interesting. I look forward to watching him take these grandchildren of immigrants to go set foot on Mars. That and a bag of fries, to go.
