Inside Washington's Headlines

by the multi-ethnic people who make up Radnor

The Cherokees and other native peoples of North America were getting along just fine when all of a sudden, from their point of view, Europeans invaded. There went the neighborhood!

The Cherokees and other native peoples of North America were getting along just fine when all of a sudden, from their point of view, Europeans invaded. There went the neighborhood!

To Sarah 'Sadie' Scotch, who has lived in France and Belgium as well as in her native United States, and who has traveled the world, visiting and being at home in far-away Russian villages and in exclusive London clubs. Nothing stopped her; no challenge phased her. This she demonstrated when an Italian business associate tossed her the keys to an SUV that she had never seen before and told her to follow him. He jumped into his sports car and tore off down a hillside, never looking back, smartly handling the twists and turns of the hilly road along Lake Maggiore on the Swiss border.

Sarah followed, shifting the gears constantly, never grinding them, as she navigated the hairpin turns. Her passengers looked over the steep drop below. They grew silent and gripped whatever they could find to grip. She never lost sight of the sports car ahead and pulled up beside it at the destination.

Sarah has a new destination. She has already investigated her Lithuanian roots and is now off in search of her Cherokee roots. May she find them and in doing so may she find herself.

A bit of Radnor goes with her in her search. A bit of her ability to use humor to resolve difficult situations stays behind, as this plea to U.S. officials to stop the silliness and get to work on a rational and fair immigration policy demonstrates.

PLEASE NOTE: What follows is satire, a tongue-in-cheek attempt to make a serious point. The United States has some serious border security and immigration issues; so do many other countries. To deny access to people who are willing to work hard and contribute to American life does not seem to be working. To force hard working people to break the law does not seem to be working, either.

Remember, today's immigrants will not ruin the neighborhood. Somebody already did that.

At a Radnor client dinner last fall in Washington, it became clear that two aliens had infiltrated Radnor. This is a cause for alarm for all real Americans. We need to protect our ancient values and our historic two-centuries old culture! Disney World itself may be threatened to say nothing of the damage this could do to baseball.

First one, then two, and pretty soon they take over. That’s what could happen. Who would have expected this? Here we are, a true red, white and blue American company, and we go out and hire a man who speaks Japanese as well as English. Now that he’s on the payroll, we learn he also speaks some Cherokee. He is a Cherokee! Should we have figured it out when he told us he was originally from Oklahoma?

Save the women and children!

Still, he’s a nice guy and he does a great job and we’re happy to have him. One-on-one, we all like him. We don’t hold it against him that he’s a Cherokee. He doesn’t seem to resent that we real Americans stole his ancestors’ land and stuck his people on a reservation. After all, we stole that land fair and square!

But suddenly, things are getting out of hand. We hire this young woman from Belgium who speaks French as well as English and the next thing you know, she’s a Cherokee, too! Where are they all coming from? It’s insidious: These Cherokees are sneaking in. Should we erect a fence in the reception area? Should we barricade the elevator? Perhaps a sign saying 'Cherokees need not apply' will help. No, probably not. Signs like that didn't keep the Irish out and now there are Irish-Americans everywhere. Today, to be Irish-American is to be quintessentially American.

We admit that we real Americans sometimes have problems working together. But most of the time we all get along.

We've had both Greek and Turkish Cypriots work with us. We have a Russian who insists he’s a Tatar and a man from Tatarstan who says he's Ukrainian. We've had Iranians, Georgians (from both the country in the Caucasus and the state in the U.S.) and Africans and African-Americans, too.

Dukes don't emigrate but desperate and strong people do

We may hire a woman who has Swedish citizenship and actually lives in Sweden. How did that happen? She’s originally from Turkey but she says she’s not Swedish or Turkish. She says she’s Kurdish. Whatever!

We had a Chinese who spoke Oxonian English. He decided that he wanted to learn the American dialect and kept practicing on idiomatic and colloquial Americanisms. He ultimately gave up because, he said, his perfectly acceptable Oxford accent was being ruined. 'I will end up being the only speaker of an odd dialect of English and that will be a pity.' He then noted that the thing about America is that no one is different because everyone is different. He wanted to stay in the U.S.

We had a Japanese-American who spent part of World War II in an internment center. She loved the U.S. with a deep dignity even as she never forgot the indignity that her country had forced her to suffer.

In London we’ve got a couple of Frenchmen and an Indian (a real Indian from India) who grew up in the U.S. One of our Belgians held his ears when he first heard the French accent in Quebec. A Canadian preferred French but we suggested that she use English when she talked with the man from Belgium. They have done excellent work together. A Swede spoke Chinese and French fluently, plus very good Spanish. We valued her impressive language skills, but we needed her leadership ability.

We have worked with several people who grew up with Arabic as the everyday language and two Zulu from South Africa who had no trouble understanding the English spoken in Washington but had difficulty understanding the English accent of another South African. Language skills, while important, do not tell the full story.

Some of us are or have been Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Sikh, Hindu and Christian. We have had atheists and a Baha'i at Radnor. We have concluded that religion - or lack thereof - is no better indication of performance than ethnicity or language.

Maintaining a proper prejudice is getting harder

People are getting all mixed up and it’s hard to know who is where, or who is what. How can a person maintain a proper prejudice when everyone is all mixed up and moving around? Sure makes it harder to judge people when you have to base it on their performance rather than their looks, language, religion or ethnicity!
 

What we need is strong leadership, someone with experience in moving around and taking charge. Perhaps we need somebody with the resolve of King Canute, the ancient Viking invader who became ruler of England and then stood on the English coastline and commanded that the tide not rise. As his feet got wet, he understood that even the most powerful autocrat has limits.
In some respects, Canute was very American: He was a Dane, married to a Pole. He moved to a new land and expected to run the place and do the impossible.

Seems like our kind of guy. Can we hire him?

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