Donald K. Allen for President

Top of the Week

July 14, 2008

    We now have campaign bumper stickers available at our office headquarters.  If you would like one (or more), just send me your mailing address and I'll be happy to get it off to you.  Or just stop in at 4501 Market St., Youngstown, OH.  If you're in Youngstown on Market Street, please come in and sign the Ohio petition for me to get on the state ballot this November.  Ohio requires 5,000 signatures and recommends an additional 20% to account for invalid entries, so I'm shooting for 6,000.  The petitions need to be turned in no later than Aug. 21, and I'm planning on taking them myself to Columbus the day before.  To sign the petition you simply need to be an Ohio registered voter.  If you would like to help gather petition signatures, I have the petitions and clipboards ready to go.

A topic this week in the news is multilingualism. Some bemoan the fact that Americans, in general, speak only English, and even that might entail poor grammar. It’s true, Americans have really not had a need to learn other languages, unlike children in Europe and other countries. We move from state to state and are able to communicate with other Americans, but in Europe a short drive will land you in another country that speaks another language. Nevertheless, most European children also learn English because it is today’s language of international business.

Don’t blame the USA for making English so important. Have we forgotten the British Empire? The language was spread around the world by Great Britain, and we just happened to be an offshoot of that. So, should our children learn Spanish so that they can communicate with all the Spanish-speaking immigrants (legal and illegal) coming into this country? No. No. The obligation is not ours to adapt to them, but them to us. I do not see us becoming a bilingual country out of necessity.

Learning other languages is an important part of our educations, however, and knowing more than just English is a true plus in the business world. But if you want to learn a truly beneficial second language, perhaps it should be Chinese, not Spanish.

T. Boone Pickens’ plan to relieve our need for foreign oil is something he is not just proposing, but acting on. He is building the largest wind farm in our country in northern Texas right now as a private business venture. Our last five administrations have done virtually nothing to relieve our dependence on foreign oil. If anything, the previous five Presidents have made us even more dependent. Now we are at the mercy of the OPEC cartel, speculators, and environmentalists. Congress must take even more responsibility for the predicament we are in by bowing to lobbyists and political action committees for decades instead of considering the strategic needs of our country first.