Monday, July 14, 2008

Its a Small World After All

Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama told a group in Georgia this past Tuesday that American's need to learn a foreign language before graduating school. Predictably, the Right jumped all over Senator Obama for this remark. The arguments range from surrendering to illegal immigrants by forcing Americans to learn Spanish to our country to exponentially bigger than Europe so we don't need to learn foreign languages to go from one end of the country to another.

So far all the arguments don't cut it. I have lived in Europe for two years and seen how Americans act when they travel abroad. It is not pretty and can be insulting. We sit back and say that people who come to our country should learn English because that is the (unofficial) language of the United States. However, Americans travel abroad and expect everyone they meet should speak English and are usually catered to. Many times I tried to perfect my German in shops, restaurants, and biergartens only to have to employees reply back in English.

Changing economic fortunes and changes in communications technology have Americans interacting with people from other countries more than ever before. More and more Americans are working for companies based in Japan, Korea, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. American companies such as Chrysler and Anheuser-Bush are owned by European companies. Chances are Americans will need to communicate with their bosses who might like it if their employees learned the language of the company. Internet applications such as Skype allows people to contact anyone around the world for free if you call a computer.

Senator Obama is just saying something I have been saying for years so I have to give him his due. If Obama's idea of teaching foreign languages to American students is all the Right have to attack him on then Senator McCain may be in serious trouble in November. Of course if all the Left has to attack McCain is their version of Swift Boating claiming the Republican nominee was a bad pilot and got special treatment in the Hanoi Hilton while a POW they have problems too but that is a story for another day.