[Dragaera] No traffic since February?

[Steve Rapaport]

About the slums of new york -- the waves of immigrants didn't melt into each
other, but they certainly did, after a generation or two, become Americans
and upwardly mobile.

First the Irish, then the Jews, and eventually even the Puerto Ricans
started out as the lowest of the slumdwellers, banded together into ghettos,
created mutual support, and worked their way up into middle-classhood,
dumping instead on the next wave.

So the "melting pot" did have some useful effect.

I don't know if this would work for the Teckla unless they could stand on
the heads of the Easterners.  And who would the Easterners stand on?

StY

On 17/03/2008, Scott Schultz <scott at cjhunter.com> wrote:
>
> >Maybe it's just the intertia of tradition.
>
>
> To elaborate on this a bit further - The social scientists of the late
> 19th
> and early 20th century had their "melting pot" theory that justified the
> slums of New York. They felt that given sufficient time, the immigrants
> would become integrated into the greater American society and adopt
> American
> ideals and what-not.
>
> While some of that certainly went on, I think it's pretty clear that the
> "melting pot" was mostly a big fantasy designed to support the slums as an
> institution that guaranteed a lot of cheap labor. The reality was that the
> varous ethnic groups did not "melt" into each other. Rather, they staked
> out
> their own territories and people sought out other with similar backgrounds
> to live, work and socialize with.
>
> It may simply be that the slums of South Adrilankha exist because it's
> human
> nature for Easterners to congregate together and create an island of
> Eastern
> society in the middle of a foreign land. Joining the Tekla in order to
> gain
> some measure of respectability would probably be shown to be ineffective
> pretty quickly, given that Tekla themselves get precious little respect
> from
> the other Houses. Why bother, when staying in the slums at least lets you
> earn the respect of your own people?
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
\Steve