[quote=@Vilageidiotx] We've always done that though. You could take this argument and transpose it into the world of 1850's politics and, honestly, it would fit perfectly. Swap the Irish for the Mexicans and Papacy for moral degeneracy and wham bam, you've traveled into the past 150 years. And we didn't smash ourselves together. You make it sound like the United States was some weird international particle collider experiment done from the very beginning as a purposeful attempt at multiculturalism, when reality is way more chaotic. Some people immigrated here on their own volition, others came here as refugees. Others didn't have a choice; they where either assimilated by conquest, or in the case of the black man, stolen from their rightful home. And this is history. This is how it has always worked in the entire world in every nation for all time. People move, borders shift, cultures change. You can't really draw a line around a group of people and say "This is a culture" because as soon as you do, it makes connections outside of the line, or it changes from within. To attempt to freeze a culture is absolutely futile. [/quote] What I meant regarding the collision of cultures was that people allowed for too much interconnection between races/ethnicities which resulted in a society where none of the participants can be truly happy. While it may be true that culture itself changes, it should change naturally in an attempt to serve it's people. Culture is a representation of a certain racial/ethnic identity. As soon as the identity outpaces the culture or vice versa, there begins a stagnation and decline in society. You see this with the Roman Empire, where it eventually became flooded with individuals who were decidedly not Roman and did not conform to the practices of the Romans to such an extent where it preserved peace. To say that a people and their values can be so malleable that they should not be preserved is a dangerous path to tread.