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Saturday, June 19, 2010

America the Melting Pot?

    Those in my age group were always taught that America is a melting pot.  While I think that might have been true years ago, I'm not so sure that it is true today.  Here's an example of a melting pot...coffee.  A group of us might go out for a cup of coffee and one of us might have it with milk and sugar.  Someone else might have it black.  Still others might have it with saccharin, aspartame, splenda, and maybe someone will even have an expresso con panna.  In the end we will all be sitting down enjoying a cup of coffee together and that's all anyone will think about.  Once the coffee is made, you can't seperate out the sugar or the milk or the splenda.  It's just plain coffee.

    In contrast, we could all be enjoying a tossed salad.  Now a tossed salad might include lettuce, spinach,
tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, red onions, and any number of other fruits and/or vegetables.  The difference between coffee and a tossed salad however is that while each ingedient enjoys the same bowl, each ingredient also maintains its own identity.  As a result, some may choose to pick out the tomatoes and toss them aside.  Others might not like the cucumbers.  And to make it more complicated, tomato organizers might even get all the tomatoes together and have them form their own group called a tomato salad.  Likewise, the cucumber organizers might organize all the cucumbers into a cucumber salad.  Get the point?  It would be like having a bunch of (and where have I heard this before?) community organizers.

    So where does this end?  Instead of enjoying a nice tossed salad whereby all of the components reside in the same bowl, each ingredient would insist on still being on the same dinner table but residing in a seperate bowl so it could maintain its own identitiy.  Instead of a tossed salad we would then have a bowl of lettuce, a bowl of tomatoes, a bowl of cucumbers, a bowl of olives, etc., and there would be no such thing as a tossed salad as we know it.  I suspect that even environmentalists would object to that.  It would just create more bowls to wash which would mean using more fresh water, flushing more detergents down the drain, bigger sewage treatment plants, and more water pollution.  It would be like having a bunch of people of different nationalities who all want to live in America but wanting to continue to speak their own foreign languages and fly their own foreign flags.  How stupid would that be?

    Personally I think that there is nothing better than a nice chilled tossed salad especially on a warm summer day.  I enjoy every bit of it and I think that's how a salad should be.  The only thing is that I think we can all agree to keep out those anchovies.  I hate those anchovies.  You know what I mean, wink, wink.

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