What happened to the 'Melting Pot?'

Back when I was a kid.

You know, I'm not naïve, this country has never been anywhere near perfect. The United States was faced with a metric shit-ton of problems during the period of my childhood.

Protesting the Vietnam War.
Public Domain: Protesting the Vietnam War by Frank Wolfe, October 21, 1967 (NARA)

As some examples, there was the Vietnam War, the lack of civil, gay, and women's rights, the United States riding roughshod over third world countries, the destruction of the environment and the depletion of the world's resources. The list goes on and on.

There were, of course, many attempts to correct these problems.  People actually tried hard to make a difference for the future and in many cases made some progress. Unfortunately, many of those attempts also failed, and others - those that we had made progress on in the sixties, have since been rescinded by reactionary right-wingers.

The thing is though, even with all of that - when I was a kid Americans as a whole were proud of the diversity that had helped build the country.  We were taught in school, and told nightly on the news, about how this whole 'Melting Pot' (some would call it more of a stew pot) that was the makeup of United States is what made it exceptional. While we may not have valued the ethnicities themselves, we valued the different viewpoints and ways of accomplishing things that came along with them.

Melting Pot
Melting Pot with stroke, by GD, openclipart.org

I haven't heard anything about a Melting Pot in years.  These days, if you are not a fair-skinned northern European immigrant, you are automatically assumed by many to be dangerous, lazy, and in essence, crap. 

So what happened to this? As I said, I can't remember hearing anything about a Melting Pot in years.  I understand that many Americans are afraid of people that are 'different.' They always have been though.  The events such as 9/11 just amplified the fears and xenophobia that were already there.  Surely something that the majority of Americans used to crow about endlessly can't have just disappeared from their consciousness?