you seem to do your best to reduce conversation here to the same drivel that predominates everywhere else. (the same drivel you ostensibly find so objectionable)

Well, that's the very nub of it all, wouldn't you say, Of Troy?

"Everywhere else" is also here - right here, in this public talk forum.

This is not a private enclave for the self-aggrandizement of those who arrived here first.

What gives you the right, apart from your Carpal Tunnelarity, to sermonize while I may not?

Let the first be last, and the last be first.

"What mayhem!", you say.

"It has ever been thus."

We had best be clear about that from the outset. This melancholy truth may be a bitter pill to swallow, especially for those zealous modern sensibilities that crave precision more than they covet accuracy. But the fact of the matter is that human affairs, by their very nature, cannot be made to conform to the scientific method--not, that is, unless they are first divested of their humanness. The scientific method is an admirable thing, when used for certain purposes. You can simultaneously drop a corpse and a sack of potatoes off the Tower of Pisa, and together they will illustrate a precise law of science. But such an experiment will not tell you much about the human life that once animated that plummeting body--its consciousness, its achievements, its failures, its progeny, its loves and hates, its petty anxieties and large presentiments, its moments of grace and transcendence. Physics will not tell you who that person was, or about the world within which he lived. All those things will have been edited out, until only mass and acceleration remain.

By such a calculus our bodies may indeed become indistinguishable from sacks of potatoes. But thankfully that is not the calculus of history. The genuinely interesting historical questions are irreducibly complex, in ways that exactly mirror the irreducible complexity of the human condition. Any author who asserts otherwise should be read skeptically--and, life being short, quickly.
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Windows on American History

It is hard for some Americans to accept the cultural diversity and the constant cultural upheaval that come with immigration. They fear that unless immigration is carefully controlled, the basic character of the nation may be altered beyond recognition and thereby undermined. For others, it is hard to imagine their country without a steady flow of immigrants and the cultural variety it brings. It has ever been thus. The current controversies over rates of immigration and their effects upon the composition of the nation are nothing new; the subject has always been controversial. Such debates do, however, have their significance, since they go to the heart of the open question of whether America is fundamentally a British or a European or a universalistic or a multicultural nation.

What is sometimes lost in the abstract character of these debates, however, and their tendency to focus on aggregate numbers and inchoate abstractions like "diversity," is a simpler meaning of immigration. Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem "The New Colossus," which appears on a bronze plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty, is perhaps the best expression of it. Just as Emerson’s American Scholar disdained the "courtly muses of Europe," so Lazarus’s "mighty woman" refused to emulate the "storied pomp" of the conquering Colossus of Rhodes, preferring a humbler name: "Mother of Exiles." Her joy would not be in luring the powerful and well born, but in embracing the huddled masses and wretched refuse of the earth. To the proud spirit of the Old World she implored: "Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me." To generations upon generations of the homeless and tempest-tossed--Irish potato farmers, German political refugees, persecuted Russian Jews, Italians, Poles, Greeks, Czechs, Mexicans, Salvadorans, Vietnamese, Cubans, Cambodians, Kosovars--these have not been empty words.

Emma Lazarus came from a sophisticated and refined New York Jewish family. But the sentiments in her poem could have come straight from the biblical prophets and the Christian New Testament--the last shall be first, and the first shall be last; and the stone that was rejected shall become the cornerstone.

The Different, But Necessary, Truths of History and Science
American Educator, Fall 2002

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