I respectfully disagree.
To me, multiculturalism is not the problem - rather, it's the antagonism towards assimilating to the American culture.
When I immigrated with my parents, assimilation into "the melting pot of America" was considered not just the right thing to do, but the desirable thing to do. To be a naturalized American Citizen was what every immigrant desired, and the ceremony was not only given dignity, but was also celebrated. To many of us, the Rights afforded a Citizen was spoken of with reverence, if for no other reason than the fact that they were not seen as such in our native lands.
So we kept our ethnic identities, but it was our goal to "
be" American. To be appointed to West Point or Annapolis was celebrated by parents as much as an acceptance to Harvard or M.I.T. We looked to our predecessors in the process - the Germans, the Italians, the Irish, the Jews - and we wished (and worked for) our presence among them, with the understanding that hard work and merit *_GOT_* a person somewhere here in America.
Somewhere along the line, somehow, this got lost. Thinking back to my childhood and young-adulthood, I think it may have started when we began to hyphenate our identities as
X-Americans; or maybe it's when we started giving away participation trophies instead of risking our kids to disappointment....but maybe that's just my "grumpy old man" thinking: after all, Rock-n'-Roll is the devil's music!
Personally, I remain hopeful that our spirit of patriotism will rebound.
We're a rather young country: many on the outside have referred to us as "adolescents," and in many of the ways that it's been written, I actually think that they're on-the-mark, and this lack of a strong cultural identity, I believe, is hallmark. It's my hope that as with a person as he/she passes through adolescents, we'll come back to realizing that we share more common than we are different, and that we once again identify first as Americans.
