A President’s Speech

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(The Annoying One @ Jun 17 2007, 01:44 PM) [snapback]463485[/snapback]</div>

Wow - that hit home - what a great speech.

He is right - there are too many of those hypo's ruining this country.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(bigmahma @ Jun 17 2007, 01:44 PM) [snapback]463549[/snapback]</div>

oh YA! i get so sick of the "insert race/country here"-american.... uhm... you either american or not......

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(The Annoying One @ Jun 17 2007, 10:44 AM) [snapback]463485[/snapback]</div>

Hmmmmmm, may I be the first to call you a Nazi and the living embodiment of [attachmentid=8989]? One of my very first posts on PC, here enjoy.

Wildkow

 

IMO, this is true of those people who live here yet profusely support the actions of their home country (or some other country they feel they have a close bond to) to the detriment of the US. For example, saying that we should attack Iran because they're going to acquire nukes and attack Israel falls under what he was talking about as a hyphenated American.

On the other hand, I know many people who have a great love for our country and what it stands for (or at least, what it used to stand for...), yet identify themselves as hyphenated Americans. They have no great love for their country of origin, nor do they believe we should do anything but whats in the best interests of America. But they do preserve and cherish their background and culture. Going to their house and having a traditional Croatian meal is great, just as they'll come to mine if I'm having a BBQ, making some Spanish Tapas or Greek Baklava.

I identify less with the OP's quote and more with one attributed to Hubert Humphrey:

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(The Annoying One @ Jun 17 2007, 06:37 PM) [snapback]463635[/snapback]</div>

Actually, you left out the best part of the speech:


Americanization
The foreign-born population of this country must be an Americanized population - no other kind can fight the battles of America either in war or peace. It must talk the language of its native-born fellow-citizens, it must possess American citizenship and American ideals. It must stand firm by its oath of allegiance in word and deed and must show that in very fact it has renounced allegiance to every prince, potentate, or foreign government. It must be maintained on an American standard of living so as to prevent labor disturbances in important plants and at critical times. None of these objects can be secured as long as we have immigrant colonies, ghettos, and immigrant sections, and above all they cannot be assured so long as we consider the immigrant only as an industrial asset. The immigrant must not be allowed to drift or to be put at the mercy of the exploiter. Our object is to not to imitate one of the older racial types, but to maintain a new American type and then to secure loyalty to this type. We cannot secure such loyalty unless we make this a country where men shall feel that they have justice and also where they shall feel that they are required to perform the duties imposed upon them. The policy of "Let alone" which we have hitherto pursued is thoroughly vicious from two stand-points. By this policy we have permitted the immigrants, and too often the native-born laborers as well, to suffer injustice. Moreover, by this policy we have failed to impress upon the immigrant and upon the native-born as well that they are expected to do justice as well as to receive justice, that they are expected to be heartily and actively and single-mindedly loyal to the flag no less than to benefit by living under it.

We cannot afford to continue to use hundreds of thousands of immigrants merely as industrial assets while they remain social outcasts and menaces any more than fifty years ago we could afford to keep the black man merely as an industrial asset and not as a human being. We cannot afford to build a big industrial plant and herd men and women about it without care for their welfare. We cannot afford to permit squalid overcrowding or the kind of living system which makes impossible the decencies and necessities of life. We cannot afford the low wage rates and the merely seasonal industries which mean the sacrifice of both individual and family life and morals to the industrial machinery. We cannot afford to leave American mines, munitions plants, and general resources in the hands of alien workmen, alien to America and even likely to be made hostile to America by machinations such as have recently been provided in the case of the two foreign embassies in Washington. We cannot afford to run the risk of having in time of war men working on our railways or working in our munition plants who would in the name of duty to their own foreign countries bring destruction to us. Recent events have shown us that incitements to sabotage and strikes are in the view of at least two of the great foreign powers of Europe within their definition of neutral practices. What would be done to us in the name of war if these things are done to us in the name of neutrality?

One America

All of us, no matter from what land our parents came, no matter in what way we may severally worship our Creator, must stand shoulder to shoulder in a united America for the elimination of race and religious prejudice. We must stand for a reign of equal justice to both big and small. We must insist on the maintenance of the American standard of living. We must stand for an adequate national control which shall secure a better training of our young men in time of peace, both for the work of peace and for the work of war. We must direct every national resource, material and spiritual, to the task not of shirking difficulties, but of training our people to overcome difficulties. Our aim must be, not to make life easy and soft, not to soften soul and body, but to fit us in virile fashion to do a great work for all mankind. This great work can only be done by a mighty democracy, with these qualities of soul, guided by those qualities of mind, which will both make it refuse to do injustice to any other nation, and also enable it to hold its own against aggression by any other nation. In our relations with the outside world, we must abhor wrongdoing, and disdain to commit it, and we must no less disdain the baseness of spirit which lamely submits to wrongdoing. Finally and most important of all, we must strive for the establishment within our own borders of that stern and lofty standard of personal and public neutrality which shall guarantee to each man his rights, and which shall insist in return upon the full performance by each man of his duties both to his neighbor and to the great nation whose flag must symbolize in the future as it has symbolized in the past the highest hopes of all mankind."

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MegansPrius @ Jun 18 2007, 11:37 AM) [snapback]463991[/snapback]</div>

There you go again putting things in context. How are we supposed to keep seeing things as black/white when you keep doing that?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(bigmahma @ Jun 17 2007, 03:44 PM) [snapback]463549[/snapback]</div>

What would the Christian-Americans say?