A Change Of Pace

Over a month ago I pledged a return to regular posting on American Voyages.  I wanted to share with my readers some thoughts on what direction the politics and culture of the continent were headed in, mostly spurred on by a flurry of political commentary from all fronts in the wake of the United States Federal government shutdown.  Then, now, and as I hopefully will remain true to form for, I was and am for keeping this blog free of too much current political commentary.  Why?  Democracy has enough angry voices out there already!  All joking aside, however, in general I try to view current events in light of a broader historical lens.  This is probably due to several factors, notably an academic background in the humanities.  Yes, a philosophy student can direct all possible energy to making bold statements about post-modernism or attempt to disprove everything that came before said student, but my own intellectual journey has found an exploration of the past, with an examination of the organic development of humanity, to be far more helpful in coming to thoughts about things in general. 

That's what I had been trying to accomplish in coming to a statement about where language and the political culture surrounding language have come to.  Why?  The why is simple.  People these days fight about everything from minimum wage to military spending (and yes, most of it revolves around money), but the thing that seems to get people, even people who could care less about all the other issues out there, very riled up.  I say this because time and again I see a mother in a grocery store talking to her kids in Spanish, or some men working together again talking in that apparently taboo language, and nearby listeners almost fly into a red hot rage over the issue!  "Speak English!"  "This is America!"  Then of course, the party in target usually apologizes, in English no less, and moves on, to no avail.  Heck, Spanish is nothing, you should see the reactions I get to when I mumble to myself about how expensive gas is, en Francais, here (or even worse, in some heavily Anglo-centric place in Ontario).  A personal mumble, barely audible to most people, is tantamount to treason for some people.

Needless to say, this tends to make me irate.  Now, while I have every intention of continuing a historical overview of the history of how we came to this place linguistically on this continent, I might as well come out and say it for all those who were wondering:  Half of this country was speaking Spanish before 1848 and a Mexican presence everywhere from California to Kansas evolved on this soil at about the same time an English-American one did (to say nothing of how many native tongues were around).  For that matter, most of the people who get mad at the "Spanish threat" are buying into an old cultural imperialism despite the fact that their ancestors were probably considered second class to anything even remotely resembling a northern European, if the standards consider even other Germanic languages to be on the same level as beloved English.  There.  I said it.  Now let me say this.  English is not going anywhere.  People around the world consider fluency in it to be desirable or at least profitable (believe it or not, especially in Latin America).  English really is an amazing language with an incredible literary history.  I say this as a person of Irish Catholic and French-Canadian heritage. 

So why put off the history posts?  They take a lot out of me.  I can rant on easily like I did tonight, but I want American Voyages to be a place of learning, not diatribe.  When I write these posts, I like them to be informed, and trust me, the next few posts in this series enter a period of remarkably complex history.  Here we will see French make a thrust to the Canadian shores of the Pacific, Spanish encounter the United States again now in the friendly territories of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and native tongues get diminished everywhere.  We get to see English change into so many regional variations in both countries, and we have a lot of fact checking to do.  Each and every post, if I try to do it well, takes a lot out of me. 

And let's face it, you all really come here just for the nature photography, right?  Well, maybe not.  It has been a while since I talked about the primary focus of this blog though: the land around us, and not just where the people have gone on it.  The statistics indicate that A.V. has been opened to a much broader reader base even on an hourly basis, probably thanks to social media advertising, but also thanks to botanical and historical organizations out there.  I need to get this thing hopping again, and the heavy posts are going to have to take a backseat until we can get things up and running.  I want to share our wonderful corner of the world, after all, with the world.  In particular I would like to thank The Hardy Palm International journal, based in Vancouver, of taking note not of my diatribes, but of my coverage of fun things like trees growing where they ought not.  Wait a minute, palms, that sounds wonderful, let's go there next.