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It seems that in America these days we are more interested in making people comfortable than making people successful. We have come to a point where we fear offending people so much that we often shelter them from new ideas, we help them by allowing them to continue in lifestyles that are detrimental to their status in society and call that kindness and one of the most important of these is in the question of language.

No matter if we as a country want to admit it or not, we all know that the language of the United States is English, yet we choose not to acknowledge that fact because we do not wish to offend people, allowing those who do not speak English to remain in their small communities cut off from the greater part of the united states. This is ultimately not good for them, not good for us and not good for the society.

It is not good for them because they remain foreigners in the country that they live in. They can not talk to their neighbors, or the clerk at the store. They are unable to participate in basic civil functions or even understand the bills that come to their home. They are cut off from many of the jobs of our society because of these same problems and we, in the name of kindness, help them remain in this position. We often to write the most basic of things in the language they want so that they can put off learning the language even longer, and worst of all we allow their children to attend school without pushing them into understanding English allowing young minds which could easily learn English to remain stifled by this lack of knowledge.

Second, we as individuals miss out when we are unable to talk to them. This is a more minor thing but still important. Americans in general do not understand the rest of the world as well as we should. One way that we would be able to improve this understanding of the world would be to encourage those who come from other places to learn a common language so that they can help us as individuals understand that the rest of the world isn't some backstreet that we can ignore but a world of beauty, wonder and people who are every bit as smart as we are.

Most importantly the strength of our society has always come in the integration of people. We as Americans have struggled with uniting ourselves since our beginning but we have grown constantly closer and an important step in that development past individual cultures that hold no particular connection to each other into a culture that takes the best ideas from all and weaves them together is the ability to dialog and debate. Without a common language that is not possible.

Learn more about this author, Elton Gahr.
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