I was getting my coffee at McDonald’s the other morning (see how often interesting things happen to me getting coffee?) and the guy brought some food out and announced what it was in Spanish (medium something was all I caught). The guy standing next to me asked if it was mine and I said it must be his because I hadn’t ordered a medium anything.

He grabbed it and headed off. A couple seconds later they brought mine out and I went over to the drink machine to get some ice to cool the coffee off. Previously mentioned medium guy was getting his drink and I said something flip like ‘I guess we’ve given up all pretense of speaking English’. He looked up and said ‘I’m a Spanish teacher so I think everybody should speak Spanish.’ I kinda laughed and walked off.

So here’s my take: I have zero problems with people speaking Spanish. I’m a big fan of the hispanics who are mostly doing jobs that Americans aren’t interested in doing. And the fact of the matter is that, unless your name is Running Bear, your family were immigrants at some point. Having said that, there’s a difference between this wave of immigrants and, for instance, the Italians. When they came to America, they spoke Italian at home but learned English for when they were in public so that they could integrate into society.  The Hispanics don’t really have to because there are Spanish versions of a lot of government documents, a lot of businesses have Spanish menus and such…. in short they can get by. The problem is by not forcing them to learn English that’s all they’ll ever do — get by. By making things easy on them, we’re basically relegating them to second class citizen status.

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