More intolerance from

the history channel.

Should put some things in perspective. One reason I was so annoyed with the Park51 business and immigration debates in connection with that concept is that we've been here before, over and over again. We have these Constitutional principles that don't seem that hard to grasp and yet people seem quite content to wink at them until they are personally inconvenienced and annoyed when other people use their basic protected liberties in ways that offend them, say by speaking in Spanish or praying to Allah or protesting military actions at military funerals. This country isn't ruled and governed by the winks and nods of an in-crowd clique however, despite that crowd's repeated best efforts to persist in that notion across history against any who were perceived as interlopers (at first). Jews and Germans, Catholics and Quakers, Chinese, Latinos, Italians, and Africans (except while we kept some such people as property), and now Muslims and Latinos again.

So it annoys me when the nativists and xenophobes pretend that its vitally important to preserve... whatever it is they think is being lost. Historically the amalgamation always has won out anyway and to our great advantage. Get over it. Quit being a sore loser and demanding everyone play by only your rules. Because your rules, quite simply, aren't good enough for everyone. Some of them are. Some of them are not. That's what happens when you run into different cultures and different people.