On February 4th, 2013, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, addressed the Duma, (Russian Parliament), and gave a speech about the tensions with minorities in Russia:
 
"In Russia live Russians. Any minority, from anywhere, if it wants to live in Russia, to work and eat in Russia, should speak Russian, and should respect the Russian laws. If they prefer Sharia Law, then we advise them to go to those places where that's the state law. Russia does not need minorities. Minorities need Russia, and we will not grant them special privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how loud they yell 'discrimination'. We better learn from the suicides of America, England, Holland and France, if we are to survive as a nation. The Russian customs and traditions are not compatible with the lack of culture or the primitive ways of most minorities. When this honourable legislative body thinks of creating new laws, it should have in mind the national interest first, observing that the minorities are not Russians."
 
Otony, who isn't moving to Russia, but wonders where else to go..........

My goodness. This will never do. Too much common sense.
And Putin doesn't say, "minorities stay out". He just says if you want to live and eat in Russia you must respect the customs and laws there.
What he says is not cruel or unjust.

and we are not far behind them. At least the Russians understand that it will take a unified culture to have a unified country.

Within a unified culture, there is still plenty of room for diversity of heritage, but there is an essential core of values and language.

to preserve the culture, good, bad or indifferent. We are, by and large, not even willing to speak up for ourselves. No, I'm NOT including those here, but referring to the nation overall. I'm not including Muslims or drug cartelists (what else can you call them?) because they IGNORE others and their laws just as the Travelers do.

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Sincerely,

Hobie

to speak my mind, to be a bigot (in their eyes) and to be offensive to some people. I have no need to feel guilty for being who and what I am. If others don't like that, then they can just keep their distance from me.

I remember the children and teens who could not stand up under the weight of peer pressure, caved and did and said things they later regretted. It would seem that peer pressure now controls the actions, speech and even the thoughts of the vast majority of people in this country.

...neither then, nor now.

would sound like Teddy Roosevelt.

"The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else."

Those are my sentiments as well.

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