A Minnesotan opinador

Writing about current and important things.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

The Wrong Decision: English-Only @ LIno Lakes

Yesterday the Lino Lakes, MN council voted to enact a law banning the city from translating any documents or certain services to languages other than English. This is what we call the "English-only resolution." They have been floating around the country for sometime.

What is interesting here is that most measures, if not all, have been enacted by mostly all-white communities. Lino Lakes is 92% white. And they passed the resolution in "preparation" to the demographics changes coming in the nation and state to save the city some money. They passed the resolution as a "getting ready" for the changes that will drain the funds from the city. I don't buy that.

What I see here is that, as someone else said during an interview somewhere, this is more about politics at the national level and have nothing to do with demographic changes happening today or Lino Lakes. This also shows the hateful sentiment of fear of the changes that will occur at Lino Lakes in not too far a future. Of course, some of the Lino Lakes leaders voted for this only to score some points with the anti-immigrant people in our communities that have hijacked the conversation over immigration and what it means to be an "American."

What they are missing though is that in fact, the demographics of the city will change. And even though this measure has been passed, it can be banished. And that is the power of people in the future. And the future of Lino Lakes is going to be made up of different people than today (just as it is today with whites being different than the natives of the first nations). I just hope that mean-spirited measures such as this, fueled by fear, are banned before doing more damage. I wish had never been enacted. The social fabric of Lino Lakes has been torn through the enactment of hateful measures disguised as a "money-saving" gauge.

The college student mentioned in the MPR story should be ashamed of Lino Lakes just as much as all of us who do not live there are ashamed of Lino Lakes and its leaders today. Soon it will be time to turn the page and allow a new one to be written where every human is valued, no matter the language that person speaks.

Lino Lakes made a big mistake.

Food for thought:
I wonder if indigenous people ever thought about making their communities their-language only in order for the whites coming at that point assimilate to their new home...... Life would be very different huh?