C is for Ciao: An Italy Alphabet
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA is the strongest, richest, freest nation in the world. We have been blessed with valuable natural resources including coal, water, forests, rich earth, as well as favorable conditions like a strategically strong location with oceans on our eastern and western borders and a temperate climate. But our greatest blessing has been the generations of immigrants who have come to our land from all over the rest of the world, eager to make their contribution to our growing country in return for the chance to earn a good life for themselves and their families. They have made us the most spectacularly diverse nation in the world, a wonderful collection of races, nationalities, colors, religious heritages, and cultures from all over the globe.
A hundred years ago some Americans believed that we should think of these newcomers to our land as being dropped into a “melting pot” that could boil away their distinguishing cultures, homogenizing them into a new multiethnic America. I have always believed that the better analogy for America would be the mosaic, like those in many church windows, made up of fragments, each a different size, shape, and color, harmoniously arranged to form beautiful figures and patterns. It would be tragic if our country were to sacrifice the immigrants’ gifts in favor of some kind of bland uniformity. I see America as a magnificent new nation made up of millions of people who have come here bringing with them reflections of their own distinct cultures and special gifts, joining with the Americans already here within the confines of our Constitutional Rule of Law and traditions. Our beauty is in the harmonizing—not the homogenizing—of our people.
Try to imagine how great a loss it would be if we erased from our culture the reflections of architecture and skill that built the aqueducts, the paintings and brilliance of da Vinci and Michelangelo, the operas, the science, the literature, the fashion, the cuisine, and the thousands of years of history. Those are all gifts that have been brought to us and preserved for us largely by Italians, and that have now become important parts of our open-armed American culture that absorbs, adopts, and shares freely the offerings of all people who have come here seeking to be part of the dazzling “American Mosaic.”
