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"O, opinión puede usted vea"
("Oh say can you see")
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Why is everyone so upset by the American anthem being sung in Spanish? Singing a countries anthem is supposed to be a way of honoring the country. Since when has the language it is sung in become a problem. There are a lot of non-Americans that don't like the United States so we should be happy when anyone sings our national anthem, regardless of the language!
Let's be honest, it isn't the language, it is the fact that many are mad about the illegal immigrant issue. Yes, we have a huge Mexican illegal immigration issue but lets not go off half cocked if someone sings our anthem in Spanish, or any other language for that manner. Some politicians are even talking about making it illegal to sing the American anthem in any language other than English. How stupid! It would be sad if we allowed a general unhappiness with the illegal immigrant issue to foster such an unnecessary and bigoted law. If our president was visiting Spain and a group of school children went to the trouble to learn how to sing the American anthem in Spanish for the president he would certainly be honored and pleased to hear the children sing it in Spanish. Have we forgotten that, except for the American Indians, we are all immigrants or descendents of immigrants!
Most Americans seem to have a miss-guided understanding of patriotism. A dictionary definition of patriotism is; "support of one's own country." Recent marches and demonstration have vividly shown that their are a whole lot of Mexican's in this country that want to stay and be able to legally call the United States their own country. Whether or not they should be allowed to legally stay is a big issue that needs to be resolved but there is no good reason to get mad at them for indicating their desire by singing our anthem in Spanish.
America was populated by immigrants from every country on earth and there has always been hatred of some races by those that were closely affected when masses of immigrants settled near by. Chinese were brought in by the boat load to help build the railroads in the west. Boat loads of Italian and Polish families were brought in to work in the foundries and steel mills. All of these were hated at the time by earlier immigrants that were already established in an affected community. If you are old enough to remember, you know that the jobs these immigrants took were mostly the hard dirty jobs that the established immigrants didn't want. Sound familiar?
Our Mexican immigration problem exists today only because we created the problem. If we had not created an economic border between Mexico and the United States the two countries would have evolved economically in a similar fashion and we would not have had a very poor country just across the border from a very rich country. It is that disparity that has created the problem. If you were born in a poor little village with no opportunity to earn a decent living and there was a rich country with high paying jobs just across the border what would you do?
It is time for Americans to put aside their fear and bigotry and support a normalization of the Mexican border. It will take a while for Mexico to catch up with the United States and there will be some economic pain in the process but the longer we wait the worse the problem will get! Canadians do not live in a different economic world and do not sneak across the border for jobs. As Mexico becomes economically closer to the United States the problem will gradually go away. We created the problem and we need to solve the problem rather than building a Berlin wall between our two countries.
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