My wife and I recently went to New York City to celebrate our wedding anniversary. We had never done this and thought it would be great to see the largest city in the United States and the things we had always heard about. The city is still recovering from COVID so some things were not open to see. No shows on Broadway yet. The Statue of Liberty is closed for now. Ellis Island cannot be toured yet. But overall, we saw plenty to keep us busy.
We stayed in Astoria, an area of Queens, and rode the subway everywhere we wanted to go. We took a guided tour of Central Park on Saturday morning led by a woman who has lived in NYC for over 40 years. She took us to parts of the park we would never have seen before including wooded areas that many people do not know are part of it. We found the Arboretum in the northeast section where a wedding was taking place beneath an arch of flowers. Nearby was another arch with wisteria draping down, said to be the hiding place of many raccoons now and then.
After some lunch, we rode the subway to Chinatown to begin another guided tour of Chinatown and Little Italy. It was led by a great young man who is a descendant of immigrants who settled NYC and he grew up not too far from where the tour happened. Our group was composed of a young African-American woman with an African given name, a young man from India who works in southern California, a young Asian woman from Georgia, a young Latino couple from Miami, and my wife and me. As we toured that very interesting historical area, I began to think about how our tour group represented the immigration story we were learning about. Every one in the group represented immigrants who came to the US and whose legacy we lived out each day. Here were 8 strangers who had not known one another before meeting that day and we all had a story to tell that would enrich the total story of America.
New York itself is a melting pot of cultures. Astoria where we stayed had a Greek bakery a block from the apartment where we stayed and a Greek market 5 blocks away. There is a Thai restaurant beside one owned by immigrants from Bosnia. Italians have many shops in the area. It was wonderful to walk down the street and hear people speaking languages that are not English. What a rich, diverse culture is NYC and its various boroughs are filled with a rich sampling of the world’s peoples.
I cannot understand people who have a narrow viewpoint toward culture. They want everyone to blend together. They want everyone to speak English. They want some form of homogenization that would erase the distinctions that makes us individuals. They forget that the American story is a story of immigrants. Everyone except Native Americans came to the shores of the US from somewhere else. We are a story of diversity and it should be celebrated.
My ancestors were mostly from the British Isles. I have a sampling of all of them in my genealogy. I was surprised to find I also have a bit of French and Swedish in there, according to Ancestry.com. I have traveled to some of their homelands and explored them so I could have a mental picture of what the land of my ancestors looks like today. I could never know what it looked like when they inhabited its’ shores. l wish I could have known them but learning about them and their cultures is the next best things.
I want to celebrate who we are. I want us all to be proud of who we are as individuals and as descendants of many peoples. I want our language and ethnicity and all that make us who we are to be proudly proclaimed. I don’t want us to be the same in every way. What a boring existence that would be! I want to hear others speak their native tongues and to hear stories about their lands and to visit those lands if I can. I want to be friends with all the world’s peoples and meet as many of them as I can. I want the voices of hatred to be silenced as we all strive to make friendship the rule of the day in all the world. I celebrate myself and sing myself, as Walt Whitman did himself, and I celebrate you too, all you are and everything that makes you the unique person you are. I want to eat your foods and hear your music and sing your songs. I want you to be my brother and sister and kindred and for us to find a unity that will bind us together as one people forever.
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