Somewhat more than thirty years ago I worked as an engineer for a company that was very important in the petroleum and petrochemical industries.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They were heavy hitters.\u00a0 Unsurprisingly they were very well represented in Venezuela.\u00a0 They worked extensively with the companies that produced oil in that country.\u00a0 And equally unsurprising they often employed Venezuelans on many different projects both in Venezuela and elsewhere.\u00a0 But what was surprising to me was how many of these \u201cVenezuelans\u201d were Germans.\u00a0 Apparently, at that time, there was a sizable ex-pat community of Germans living in Venezuela permanently and working in the petroleum industries.<\/p>\n
I became friendly with one of them.\u00a0 A younger guy named Karl who looked extremely German but who spoke English with a very odd accent.\u00a0 It had hints of Spanish, German and British English.\u00a0 I asked him about this and learned that he had been educated in an International German school in Venezuela.\u00a0 I got the distinct impression that Karl considered himself a German not a Venezuelan.\u00a0 But at the same time, he had never spent any considerable time in Europe in his life.\u00a0 He was a cultural German who lived in South America.\u00a0 And he was fairly well travelled in the various countries of South America and had very definite opinions about these countries.\u00a0 In particular Karl was very vocal about the attractiveness of the women living in these various countries.\u00a0 He seemed to favor the Argentinians most highly, liked the Venezuelans and was most uncomplimentary about the girls from Brazil.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 But now that I reflect on it maybe it\u2019s more of a cosmopolitan strategy to avoid being at the whim of the economy of just one country.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
I haven\u2019t 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.\u00a0 How would people whose families have lived here for generations and grew up as Americans cope with an \u201cAmerica\u201d that more resembled Brazil or South Africa?<\/p>\n
Well, maybe the strategy to consider is creating the equivalent of ex-pat communities in this country.\u00a0 We could build enclaves where we speak standard English and the kids go to \u201cAmerican\u201d 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
It seems a little sad and pathetic.\u00a0 Being a stranger in your own land.\u00a0 But maybe it\u2019s better than the alternative.\u00a0 Currently the public schools in all the big cities and lots of smaller places are becoming useless as far as the education they provide.\u00a0 In fact, many of them are now dangerous for non-immigrants who are victimized because of the popular culture stigmatizing them as racists.\u00a0 And the culture that will emerge in these \u201cmelting pots\u201d will be antithetical and hostile to the culture we recognize.\u00a0 Unless you want your children indoctrinated into this third world ghetto culture you will be forced to send them to private school.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s my thought.\u00a0 We will live in this country because we were born here.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Update<\/strong><\/p>\n War Pig commented:<\/strong><\/p>\n Given the democrats\u2019 inclination to oppose school choice, they will go after such schools. They want all youth indoctrinated by their lackeys in teacher\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s teachings.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Somewhat more than thirty years ago I worked as an engineer for a company that was very important in the petroleum and petrochemical industries.\u00a0 They<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3168],"class_list":["post-30698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-a-stranger-in-my-own-country"],"yoast_head":"\n