Life in a Bubble

Somewhat more than thirty years ago I worked as an engineer for a company that was very important in the petroleum and petrochemical industries.  They had an enormous amount of experience, technology and patents for extracting oil and gas from the earth and turning it into everything from gasoline to plastics to primary organic feed stocks.  They were heavy hitters.  Unsurprisingly they were very well represented in Venezuela.  They worked extensively with the companies that produced oil in that country.  And equally unsurprising they often employed Venezuelans on many different projects both in Venezuela and elsewhere.  But what was surprising to me was how many of these “Venezuelans” were Germans.  Apparently, at that time, there was a sizable ex-pat community of Germans living in Venezuela permanently and working in the petroleum industries.

I became friendly with one of them.  A younger guy named Karl who looked extremely German but who spoke English with a very odd accent.  It had hints of Spanish, German and British English.  I asked him about this and learned that he had been educated in an International German school in Venezuela.  I got the distinct impression that Karl considered himself a German not a Venezuelan.  But at the same time, he had never spent any considerable time in Europe in his life.  He was a cultural German who lived in South America.  And he was fairly well travelled in the various countries of South America and had very definite opinions about these countries.  In particular Karl was very vocal about the attractiveness of the women living in these various countries.  He seemed to favor the Argentinians most highly, liked the Venezuelans and was most uncomplimentary about the girls from Brazil.

At the time I thought all of this very odd but I assumed it had to do with the lack of opportunities in Germany after the war.  But now that I reflect on it maybe it’s more of a cosmopolitan strategy to avoid being at the whim of the economy of just one country.  After all, maybe Germany has always produced more chemists and engineers than it can employ locally and so emigration may be a common choice for Germans.

I haven’t thought about Karl for at least thirty years but I was thinking about what it would be like to live in America after the addition of a hundred million third world immigrants.  How would people whose families have lived here for generations and grew up as Americans cope with an “America” that more resembled Brazil or South Africa?

Well, maybe the strategy to consider is creating the equivalent of ex-pat communities in this country.  We could build enclaves where we speak standard English and the kids go to “American” school and are taught our history and culture and cultural events are planned and there would be churches and cultural organizations that catered to the ex-pat population exclusively.  And a network could be built between these communities across the country and they would serve as a larger community to help preserve the American culture and way of life.

It seems a little sad and pathetic.  Being a stranger in your own land.  But maybe it’s better than the alternative.  Currently the public schools in all the big cities and lots of smaller places are becoming useless as far as the education they provide.  In fact, many of them are now dangerous for non-immigrants who are victimized because of the popular culture stigmatizing them as racists.  And the culture that will emerge in these “melting pots” will be antithetical and hostile to the culture we recognize.  Unless you want your children indoctrinated into this third world ghetto culture you will be forced to send them to private school.

So that’s my thought.  We will live in this country because we were born here.  But if we want to keep our culture and identity, we might have to build ex-pat enclaves and be strangers in our own land.

Update

War Pig commented:

Given the democrats’ inclination to oppose school choice, they will go after such schools. They want all youth indoctrinated by their lackeys in teacher’s unions. A no-politics school opened in Colorado after lots of fights in the courts. The school is now producing test scores outstripping public schools by a wide margin. Don’t think the left is done with them, either. ANY resistance to Marxism must be crushed. No school which opposes leftist ideology can be allowed to flourish and embarrass Karl’s teachings.