Multicultural Gothic
From the Painting American Gothic
Illustration By: Kagan Mcleod After Grant Wood
I met with a group in New York which holds monthly meetings but which I can attend only periodically. Despite my low attendance record, I am on the mailing list for announcements on upcoming meetings and also for the topics to be discussed at these meetings.
I will post later on the discussion and responses. But here was one question about heaven which I found intriguing and insightful. (It wasn't so far off topic since the discussion dealt with Western civilization, and a large part of the strength of Western civilization was Christianity and belief in God which of course includes the afterlife and heaven.)
"What language is spoken in heaven? What are the flower and plants in heaven?"
Simple but profound questions, which refer to the multicultural utopia that is now being designed in Western countries, but with little success. People still group around their cultures. Even if they don't "speak" their ethnic languages, they still "think" and behave within those cultural and ethnic contexts.
One fascinating thing is as the numbers of ethnic groups increase both through immigration and birth, the younger generations start to congregate together.They all speak English fluently, and with less fluency their parents' languages. These Chinese, Korean, Indian, Somali, Ethiopian etc. youth groups create their own variations of "ethnic" English adding words from their ancestral languages, making their own distinct "language," or perhaps a better word than language is their own idiom. They also have subtle but distinct accents so astute observers can distinguish a Chinese ancestral influence from a Korean, or an Ethiopian from a Somali.
So multicultural utopia is a myth. Eventually, at a critical number, people capitulate towards their own particularities.