America has always been known as a kind of melting pot. Or has it? That phrase "melting pot" is really en vogue right now with the "drive-by media" and so you hear it almost every night on the evening news or some cable outlet.

Before I go into the intricacies of how America isn't quite the "melting pot" that it is so often labeled, let me quickly explain the term "drive-by media."

I shamelessly admit cribbing that from Rush Limbaugh. I'm a big fan and so some imitation is inevitable. When Rush uses the term, he's referring to mainstream media that try and reduce news items to small sound bytes so they can insert them into news wrap-ups every hour on the hour, and so on and so forth. The term has a little extra meaning to me here in Gaffney.

Other than The Ledger, dear reader, the media in the Upstate and Charlotte tend to just "drive by" Cherokee County on their way to what they consider bigger or more important stories. If you want to know what happens in Gaffney, you'll frequently only find it in these pages right here.

Okay, enough of tooting my own horn, the question at hand is, America: Melting Pot or Not?

During the original settling of this great nation of ours, the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock did certainly meet new and interesting people. Many of them did not speak English. There wasn't a whole lot of melting involved (or even melding) until after some rough winters and tough wars. Pots, however, I'm sure were involved.

Flash forward a few years to when there actually is a United States of America and there's a whole mess of "immigrants" from Africa who aren't exactly melting into society. I do believe there was another war before they were considered to be "melted" into America.

Then we hit the 1920s and it looks as though the USA finally has this thing figured out. Tons of immigrant families came to Ellis Island. They looked up and saw the Statue of Liberty and it seemed her clarion call of "Send me your tired, your hungry, your poor..." really meant something.

But there was one key with those immigrants that today's have totally forgotten about.

You must learn to speak the English!

I can't tell you how much it makes my blood boil when I call my bank and I have to pick between English and Spanish. Make the case about American grammar not really being the Queen's English all you want but at least the language isn't a foreign tongue. I have no problems with immigrants coming to America - but there are two major points here. Number one, coming to America is a privilege, not a right and number two - we speak ENGLISH! It is true that there is no legally defined national language of America. Nothing in the Constitution says that English is the official language. But I think the founding fathers didn't bother to put that in because the document is WRITTEN in English. I think Spanish is a beautiful language, but it isn't my language.

If we keep this up, we'll reach a point where one half of the country doesn't understand what the other half is saying...literally. And I don't have to tell you what happened the last time you had half the country disagreeing with the other half. Can't we all just learn to communicate, in English, so as to avoid The Spanish American War II?

Besides an English language proficiency test as a part of a comprehensive citizenship policy would help to ensure that people are ready to contribute and be self-reliant when they arrive. This way, we won't end up with tens of millions of more mouths to feed on welfare rolls.

And that's some good news...

(Scott Baughman writes feature and enterprise stories for The Gaffney Ledger. You can contact him via e-mail at scottb@gaffneyledger.com)