A "Dirty" Eight-Letter "N"-Word

"Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, 'This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath never within him burned, As home his footsteps he hath turned, From wandering on a foreign strand!"

These words were penned by Scottish novelist Walter Scott in 1805, in The Lady of The Last Minstrel. Today, however, in context of massive immigration to the United States, both legal and illegal, the political Left is turning the word "nativist" into an extremely politically-incorrect epithet, if not an outright obscenity. They would have those of us having several generations of ancestral rooting in American soil to apologize for our status against the onslaught of immigrant demands upon American government for political and legal concessions to their life-styles.

The writer of this BLOG acknowledges the richness of some foreign immigrant contribution to American national culture, and to American national consciousness. Nevertheless, there are also some good things to be said for long-standing nativism in any soil on earth.

Nations, complete with national cultural consciousness, are not built overnight. It is often said that "Rome was not built in a day", and this mantra refers to spiritual and social abstractions of thought, as well as to the physically-visible. It is cultural tradition which is so very necessary, to maintain the socio-political cohesion and integrity of any society over time. This is why social innovations are often not immediately welcomed by society-at-large, and why those who have the temerity to be sufficiently individualistic enough to digress from collective social norms and "swim up-stream against the crowd" often find themselves ostracized by said society, even though they might not have violated any written laws, per se. Knowing this, foreign new-comers to America will often live together in ghetto-type situations, rather than voluntarily choosing to freely associate with the previously-established native populations-at-large. The writer of this BLOG is a very enthusiastic student of foreign languages. But he knows that no matter how well he may master the words and grammars of other languages, he will never be one of the "in-crowders" who use said languages as native languages, since he learned the languages outside of cultural context.

It is those people who are heirs to the cultural values of their ancestors, who while coincidentally occupying a particular piece of terrestrial real estate, who also have the greatest degree of social cohesion and integrity by which to administer the affairs of that piece of real estate. This is because every peoples must live off of the land upon which they exist, using whatever resources that land yields to their disposition. Any invasion or intrusion by foreigners raises at least the plausibility of dislocation of long-established traditions. Given that fear of all uncertainty is a primitive and long-established human psychic phenomenon, it is understandable that those steeped in traditions fear the worst rather than the best to come with changes brought from the outside.

Tolerance must be a two-way street, between both nativists and foreign immigrants. There is the saying, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." But this is not to say that outsiders have no wisdom or knowledge to teach to the Romans. Indeed, world history is full of examples, where one peoples have learned much over time from others. Romans learned much from the Greeks, their cultural predecessors: it is often said that while the Romans militarily conquered the Greeks, the Greeks culturally conquered the Romans. For example, the ancient Romans were a pretty stinky bunch, not knowing much about taking baths and using perfumes, until the Greeks came along to teach them these things.

In honoring the contributions of foreign immigrants to America--of which there have been many until now--the word nativist must not be a taboo word in the American vocabulary. Even the American aboriginals--incorrectly called "Indians"--would agree to that proposition. The first English settlers to the lands of present-day Virginia and Massachusetts in the 17th century, known as "Pilgrims" and "Puritans", owed their survival in the new world to education imparted to them concerning it by the long-standing natives on that soil.

-LKM