A recent proposal in Hawthorne, a city in Los Angeles county, would require business signs be in English. This is another example of government officials being busy bodies, wasting taxpayers' money. It is none of the government's business what language one chooses to use to attract customers. If a business depends on English speaking customers, it will only hurt itself by not using English. Throughout the world, business that want to attract English speaking tourists have signs in English. A Hawthorne councilwoman said that she is not bias against immigrants but want to help them. The best way the government can help businesses is by putting up as little restrictions on them as possible. Let them have the freedom to run their business as they see fit.
People who believe in "English only" are not necessary racist. Sometimes I agree with them. For example, we don't need voting ballots in languages ranging from Spanish to Chinese to Tagalog plus many others as they do here in LA county. Since citizenship supposedly require knowledge of English, I don't see why we should spend money to print ballots in so many different languages. Even people who are native English speakers vote infrequently and, judging by recent voting results, poorly. So let us just have one ballot for everybody. The people who truly care about the issues will vote in any language.
The situation with the business signs, however, is different than that of ballots. The rest of the world is learning English in greater number than ever. While in the U.S., the most diverse nation on earth, we are worrying about different languages on business signs? The children of immigrants will speak English anyway and become Americanized. I don't want to walk down every street in America and see signs like McDonald and Subway only. Signs in different languages are far more interesting and make America different from most other nations. None of these languages will ever take over for English in this country. We don't need busy bodies scaring us.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
1 comment:
Use the following html code to make a clickable link in your comment (instructions in the sidebar). You can test the link by previewing your comment.
<a href="http://angryyellowman.blogspot.com">Angry Yellow Man</a>
The above example will display as Angry Yellow Man
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
You make some good points on this subject. My initial reaction was that I disagreed with your point on the multi-language voter ballots but the more I think of it, the more I think you are correct. It seems to me that we're becoming a nation of two languages. Everywhere I turn, I get the choice of listening to my phone bill in english or espanol. I can't even get my money out of the ATM without pressing whether I want to do the transaction in english or espanol. I definitely understand the need for these options and am not really against them. However, you make a good point in that in order to vote, you must be a citizen and in order to become a citizen, you must have some knowledge of english. The only thing is that the proposals on ballots are written by lawyers and are so hard to understand sometimes I feel like I'm reading something from a foreign land.
ReplyDeleteI do agree with you that the coucil in Hawthorne is wasting tax payers money. Are things so boring in Hawthorne that they have to work on legislation like this?
I offer no resolutions here except that as a people, we choose where we live and have our business most of the time. It is up to the citizens and business owners of cities like Hawthorne to see where their money is going. I would hope that at least this proposal goes to a vote by the people.
LBOAYM