[Vision2020] In English Only?

[Tom Hansen]

>From today's (May 7, 2006) commentary on "Face the Nation" with Bob
Schieffer -

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In English Only?
By Bob Schieffer

In the ongoing effort to make our national debate about all the wrong things
we may have reached a milestone with the controversy over whether its
alright for the National Anthem to be sung in Spanish 

The blogs went nuts about it of course -- going nuts is their natural state.
Talk radio saw danger ahead -- cover the children's ears. 

I'm with them on insisting that everyone who wants to be a citizen should
learn English. In an increasingly diverse country, common experiences have
become rarer and rarer and our language is one of the few things we all
share. There is strength in that. 

But the anthem in English only? I don't get it. 

It made me proud to be an American when they tore down the Berlin Wall as We
Shall Overcome -- an American spiritual -- played on the young people's boom
boxes. And who among us can forget how we felt when those brave Chinese
students brought a papier-mache Statue of Liberty into Tiananmen Square. 

When people take our symbols of freedom as their own, it doesn't weaken our
values, it affirms they are universal. That makes us stronger, not weaker. 

So I hope our anthem will be sung one day in a hundred languages and I am
not worried that translating it will somehow dilute its message. Translation
hasn't seemed to hurt the Bible. 

And since I speak neither Hebrew nor Greek, I'm glad they went to the
trouble on that one. Otherwise, I might have missed the whole thing.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"If I wanted to overhear every tedious scrap of brain static rattling around
in your head, I'd read your blog."

- Bill Maher