Quote Originally Posted by Romik View Post
Thanks a lot for the correction rockzmom, I think that would be dismaying when your ethnic group being prevalent becomes a minority in a few decades ... I'm not quite sure what you mean upon the "old" way of thinking, of course they say that all peoples are equal but in reality it's easy to live with some side by side and with some can be tensions.
You are correct about it being dismaying or even upsetting at times. When my hubby and I bought our house 19 years ago, my hubby and the family across from us were the only "Hispanics." Now, I am known as the "white woman" in our neighborhood as I am the only white person on our block. There is one Black female who has been there for about 15 years and one house which I believe they are from India and the rest are Hispanics.

So, when I go to the local fast food places/restaurants, the employees are predominantly Hispanics and a number of them don't speak English very well (try asking for something special, like no lettuce and no sauce... the little Spanish I know comes in handy then). The same goes for the local drug store or supermarket. That is when I get frustrated, when I can't communicate with people I need to. When my grandparents came to the US they HAD to learn English. There weren't forms in their native languages, you couldn't take your driver's test in anything but English. Now everything is bilingual, a separate form, or press 2 for English and 3 for Spanish. The former immigrants assimilated, the newer immigrants don't.


Now, it is rather interesting as where I live as you can drive about 20 minutes and it will turn into an all white area (no Hispanics or Blacks) or all black area. There are certain apartment buildings that are just melting pots of immigrants. My grandmother's old building is that way. She moved in there when it was first built (in the mid 1960s I believe) and it was only whites. Then towards the early to mid 1990's... as the former tenants died or moved to nursing homes, the new tenants that moved in were not White but Jamaican, Hindi, Blacks, Hispanics... you name it.

What was sad though was that these new tenants didn't care about the place. There was a sofa in the lobby where people sat as they waited for the mail or whatever, and they burned it. When I used to go visit as a child, I would have to be mindful of the people who lived below my grandmother. No running in her apartment or stomping feet, no screaming or very loud voices etc. That was no longer the case when she lived there in the 1990s early 2000s. You could hear kids everywhere running up and down the hallways and in their apartments and even the adults cranked up their music or tvs so loud you could hear them in her apartment.

Now I must say here that this behavior change in young kids is not just with immigrants... it is all around. People are just not teaching their children how to be respectful of others and if a parent has a difficult child, well... as a mom told me yesterday her daughter threatened her to go to a judge and say her mom "verbally abused her" because the mom lectured her (a tongue lashing) on a car ride about something and she "had to listen to it all the way home." I remember when my kids were in elementary school and a white child spilled their drink. The child didn't even attempt to clean it up. When the one of the ladies in charge went over to give the child some extra paper towels and said to her to clean it up... the child responded, "that's what you're paid to do." I heard this and just about had a heart attack. I told the little girl in no uncertain terms she needed to clean up her mess.