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Our nation is built upon a history of immigration, dating back to our first pioneers, the Pilgrims. For more than three centuries, we have welcomed generations of immigrants to our melting pot of hyphenated America: British-Americans; Italian-Americans; Irish-Americans; Jewish-Americans; Mexican-Americans; Chinese-Americans; Indian-Americans.
Sydney in general is eclectic. You can be on that brilliant blue ocean walk in the morning and then within 20 minutes you can be in a completely vast suburban sprawl or an Italian or Asian suburb, and it's that mix of people, it's that melting pot of people that give it its vital personality.
While Mumbai is a melting pot of cultures, Delhi is made of community, and we can see these lines quite clearly. An aunty from Punjabi Bagh will be different from a Faridabad aunty or an aunty from Vasant Kunj.
We don't need a melting pot in this country, folks. We need a salad bowl. In a salad bowl, you put in the different things. You want the vegetables - the lettuce, the cucumbers, the onions, the green peppers - to maintain their identity. You appreciate differences.
There's a lot to love about America - freedom, the melting pot of diversity, individualism - all attractive concepts, especially to an introvert. In fact, the introverts were probably the first to feel crowded in England and to daydream about all the space they would find in the New World. Peace! Quiet!
I remember acting in a school play about the melting pot when I was very little. There was a great big pot onstage. On the other side of the pot was a little girl who had dark hair, and she and I were representing the Italians. And I thought: Is that what an Italian looked like?
Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.
It sounds stupid, but there's nothing like walking down the street and seeing a building that's older than 100 years old. I think London - not to sound pretentious - like New York, it's a big melting pot for all things and it's just got this energy that you can't find anywhere else.
To become an American citizen, we require people to read, write and speak in English. That is to help them to assimilate in our melting pot, truly to become Americans. We mock that when the cherished right to vote does not involve English any more.
We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.