Lesson #18

    The English language is inherently one of the hardest languages in the world, which is due to the fact that English is basically on odd offspring of other languages. It’s not just our language that is from other countries: it is the culture and the ideologies. Overall we are a place with an immense amount of diversity-- which you would this would make the US easy to adapt to, but in reality it makes it extremely difficult.

    Our diversity can be an amazing thing, seeing as we are able to understand the situations of many other places, and experience other cultures-- yet the drawback is that we are an outsider to other countries. It is amazing that the US can relate to so many different backgrounds, yet we have no established background of our own. This is because we have tried to make the US into a place where all countries come together, rather than focusing our energy on making the US a country of its own. As Charles Krauthammer says, the US is “a world far more complicated and fraught will division.” This is due to the fact that the US has no established past, which makes everything much harder to function. Just think about it, we are trying to combine the ideas of the whole world into one country… now does that even sound remotely plausible? To make the United States a place with no established language or culture is to make a place that cannot stand without the foundation of other countries.

    The United states is weak and lost in the state that it is in; but how can we expect it to be any other way? Has nobody ever thought of the reason why we are always so politically divided? Why every ideology comes with new ideas, and a further divide? The US government goes back and forth between democratic and republican presidents because we can’t makes up our minds, and yet we expect this country to have a sustainable future. Many countries look to the US to be strong and united, yet there is not much we have that unites us all. We all live in the same country, but cannot relate to the experience of others. If we look far enough into our past we all come from somewhere else; I come from Germany, Italy, and Poland, my best friend comes from Lebanon and Poland, my cousins come from Italy and Ireland, and my neighbor comes from China. So what really connects us to each other? Is it the experience that we have had in the United States? Is it our ancestors that came from the same place long ago? There really is no right answer, but we can’t pretend like we never have think about it.

    I think that in order for the United States to really earn the title of “United,” we need to have something that actually unifies us: whether that be an established language, or a united government. We can be a culturally diverse place and easily thrive, we just need to feel like we connect with each other. If we were all to feel banded together, then we could begin to work together to create the United States that we thrive to be. All it starts with is a single commonality.

Lesson #18: To be United, we have to feel like we can relate to each other.