Each Day Already is a Challenge

We used to be a melting pot

We used to be a melting pot, now we're just a quilt
by Marilyn Mackenzie

We used to be a melting pot. People came to America because they wanted to be us. They wanted to be Americans. America was an example of a melting pot where immigrants and people from all over the world visited and lived and shared thoughts and ideas to create one big new culture. At least that's the way it once was.

As a baby boomer growing up in Pittsburgh, the influence of so many cultures was evident in the foods we ate and the words we used regularly. If you Google "Pittsburghese" you'll find that Pennsylvania Dutch and even Yiddish words were sprinkled into our vocabulary. Family dinners showed our melting pot worked in the kitchen. Glumpkies and real Italian spaghetti or lasagna were served regularly. And the real evidence came at Christmas time, when our mothers baked cookies made from recipes shared by German, Polish, Scottish and English neighbors.

Today, liberals like to say that America is a quilt. I love quilts. Quilts are beautiful. But you can make a quilt with none of the squares being like any other.

America was great as a melting pot. It's not so great as a quilt. Today, immigrants come here not to be us, not to be Americans. They come to get what we have instead.

Immigration without assimilation is invasion. We have to stop allowing people to invade our shores who have no intention to become like us, but who want our country to become like the ones that they fled.

I have a wonderful memory of my brother, at only two years of age, teaching the Polish grandmother living next door to us simple words in English. Although she was quite old, she knew that to be a real American, she had to be able to speak English.

Yes, some of us want that America again. And that's why we selected Donald Trump for president. We want our melting pot back. The quilt has got to go.