America is a mixing pot of peoples. They have come here from all over the world. Mostly when they entered the country they came into the bigger cities. An interesting thing happened in the cities. Different ethnic groups began to establish themselves as small communities within the cities.
If you go to a multi-ethnic city like Toronto for instance, they have a Greektown and they have an Indiantown and they have a Chinatown and they have a Tehran Toronto town. Like that, an interesting thing occurs. People are attracted to what they think they are the same as.
So if a Chinese person comes into a city, he looks for other Chinese people. If an Iranian comes to Toronto, he looks for other Iranian people. The Sri Lankans have their own section. Everybody has a section. From the time that we are born, we are imprinted with certain ideas and certain kinds of situations. We become comfortable with those situations.
For instance, we all start with a language, and that language has meaning to us. When we hear the words, we respond to the words and we react and do things according to those words. But if we hear a different language that we don’t know, it sounds like noise. It has no meaning, it has no influence on us. It’s almost as if it were not there, except we hear it. It can’t influence us.
It’s interesting, the language that we know influences us tremendously, the languages we don’t know don’t influence us at all. it’s almost as if we have a center in ourselves that attracts itself to that language and draws meaning out of it, but can’t and doesn’t attract itself to any other language and draw meaning out of it. It can’t do it.
