If you don't know your history, you don't know your present....

I know people who are of the "If you can't speak English, you shouldn't be allowed in this country" camp. People whose parents I grew up with.

Whose grandparents I knew; they were my parents' age, our neighbors.

And *their* parents I also knew: well enough to say hi to. Not much else. Not because I wasn't friendly; not because they weren't.

But because "hi" was about as far as we could go together in the same language.

I know people who are of the "If you can't speak English, you shouldn't be allowed in this country" camp. People who don't know their own family history as well as I know their family history.

How can you say "you should be deported if you don't speak English" when your own great-grandmother came to this country as a new bride, not yet 21 years old....raised a family, watched her grandchildren grow, lived well into her eighties.

And in those sixty-some years, never mastered more than maybe two dozen words of English.

Do these people REALLY mean their great-grandparents should have been deported? That they themselves should not have been born Americans?

Of course not.

They're just too ignorant to understand just how recently "they" was really "us." And ignorance is NOT bliss; ignorance is the road to destruction.

History marches on; the pouting ignorant will not stop it. They can only inflict pain, most of all on themselves.