The Magic Pill that will bring us all together

I've moved on to some of my thesis-oriented reading finally, language politics and rent theory. I think the feminists may be easier to get along with than some of these language people. I certainly can see a need for a language of record for federal and state level business, so that all people are held to a single standard wrt laws and policies. But to try to legislate private language use, or to use policy to bully people into speaking English is just plain wrong. The argument that 'our' common language is what brings us together as Americans is baloney. Just because a house full of Hispanic migrant workers can and do speak English, they would not automatically be accepted as full Americans by those who are against them now for their Spanish. The new law in Arizona that allows people suspected of being illegal aliens is almost certainly put into practice by people watching for poor-looking, Spanish speaking Hispanic people, and no doubt if these people are detained and questioned, they are not always fully informed and questioned in Spanish, in the presence of an attorney, as they ought to be if they turn out to be citizens of the US. I can't actually imagine how the implementation would come about except in big cities. In a small town, no doubt everyone knows who everyone else is, so unless this thing turned into a staged witch hunt to clear out undesirables, who could a small town target? And if I, a white English-speaking person, was in Arizona, out in public, would I be questioned? If so, could I prove my identity as a citizen? I don't drive, so I don't have a drivers' license, and while I have a state ID, my hair is rather different in that picture, taken a few years back, and no one on first meeting me thinks I look 31. But no, I would never be questioned, let alone detained on suspicion of being foreign, because I am white and speak English with a Western accent. Even if I spoke entirely in a French, or German, or Russian accent, no one would be at all alarmed. If I spoke with a Spanish accent even, I'd be safe. It isn't the English then that protects me, but my skin-color. There are Mexicans who speak better English than their US citizen counterparts this side of the border, so the language test won't root out the 'extra' Hispanics, but it'll keep their numbers down, perhaps. (And this language business is bringing us all together?)

Call me old-fashioned, but to my thinking people are drawn together when they seek to understand and appreciate each other as human beings. Last I checked, speaking English was not synonymous with being human, as a necessary and sufficient condition for inclusion in our species.