Barnabas File

I have been to Washington, DC, a number of times and always came away with new insights.    We took a family trip there this past week to introduce our granddaughter, Erin, to the nation’s capital.   As always, I left with a new set of impressions.   This time I was especially sensitive to the diversity I observed.   Here are a few vignettes: The young father—possibly Ethiopian or Eritrean—sitting on a bench with his wife and two children between the Vietnam Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial and explaining to his family in precise English the importance of these sites. Muslim women carefully covered with full length dresses and the hijab while sitting at Ben and Jerry’s eating ice cream. The group of French students and their professor admiring the art works at the National Gallery of Art. Visiting school groups, both from out of town and local, composed of students of various ethnicities. Overhearing conversations in many languages and d...

Every time I visit my son and his family in the San Francisco area, I come back profoundly impacted by the diversity of the people I encounter—Japanese, Korean, Chinese, various East Asian and South Asian people, and Hispanics.   Sometimes the situation is almost surrealistic as one sees a Japanese family touring the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier whose planes inflicted major damage on Japanese planes, ships, and facilities during World War Two! The fact that we are becoming a nation of minorities in which Euro-Americans will soon be one was emphasized by the recent Presidential elections.  Mr. Romney was not just defeated by President Obama and a well-run organization but by demographics—a country that is increasingly Hispanic and Asian, a country of diversity.  This is a trend that is not going to change. I have often commented on the growing ethnic diversity in our little part of Tennessee, but we have only begun to experience what will be a tidal wave of c...