I believe people have the right to express an opinion, but I also believe that if you’re going to have an opinion and post it on social media, you should be able to back yourself with thought-out and logical reasoning. Call me an idealist.
This past weekend, one of the most widely watched events in television returned and brought many people together to just sit down, relax and eat some junk food.
It was not “The Puppy Bowl,” for those of you who might have thought otherwise… myself included.
In all seriousness though, the Super Bowl is not just an event watched by football and sports fans around the country. In fact, many people I know watch the game solely to see the funny commercials.
One of the commercials that, shockingly – to me anyway – struck up a lot of controversy and anger from many viewers was a Coca-Cola spot titled “It’s Beautiful.”
In case you haven’t watched the commercial yet, it has several clips of different people singing “America the Beautiful,” in different languages, including English.
Now, any sort of normal human being would probably watch this commercial and think that it has a nice message, we’re a melting pot, etc. But the Internet proves that some people were offended by this commercial and had no problem expressing their opinion.
The main problem they had was that “America the Beautiful,” which to these educated Internet users is our national anthem, should only be sung in English.
Now, this made me angry in several different ways. First of all, if any of the people who posted these opinions would have taken the time to use the Internet in other ways aside from posting their opinion on social media, they may have found that our country does not have a national language.
They would have also found that only about 45 percent of the country descends from an English or American heritage. So more than half of our country descends from another culture that originally speaks another language.
Secondly, most of the people who were ranting about this topic don’t even understand basic grammatical and spelling concepts of this language that they’re so territorial about.
I swear, if I have to see “your not American” one more time, I’m going to bust someone’s door down and scream “My not American what?!”
Besides that point, if you’re going to complain that a lot of people who move here don’t know how to speak “our country’s language,” let’s not forget that almost everyone here descends from an immigrant.
Back in the day, the people who spoke English moved here.
So really, if you want to make everyone “speak the language,” all of us should really be speaking in some sort of Native American tongue.
It needs to be accepted that people are different and not everyone is going to adjust to you just because you’re offended.
Wake up! It’s 2014! The sooner we realize that other people speak different languages, the sooner other countries will stop thinking we’re self-centered jerks.
KHADIJA DJELLOULI
