Americans are informed, with the patience reserved for slow children, that their culture is the default setting. Defaults, we are told, do not require protection. They require renovation. Every other culture, by contrast, arrives already framed, already precious, already in need of a plaque, a parade, and a public apology for having been insufficiently celebrated yesterday.
This is sold as sophistication. It is actually a very expensive magic trick: the thing that made the country worth moving to is treated as the only thing that must be dismantled so the move feels morally complete. If people are not coming here because of the language, the legal habits, the work expectations, the calendar, the jokes, the holidays, and the stubborn assumption that public space is shared rather than partitioned, then the marketing department has been lying for two centuries. Correction: the marketing department has been very successful. The product just keeps getting recalled by its own sales staff.
So Christmas gets the side-eye while every imported festival gets a city proclamation and a traffic cone. English is “priority” until someone finds the word colonial in a thesaurus. Flags, mottos, and ordinary expectations of assimilation are recast as aggression. Meanwhile the arriving group is encouraged to keep the whole kit: symbols, holidays, language first, and a running critique of the host. One side is told to shrink so the other can feel large. That is not pluralism. That is a time-share where only one family is allowed to rearrange the furniture.
A country that will not defend its own culture will not keep it. This is not mysticism. It is inventory. You do not keep a store by handing the register to people who announce that the brand is the problem. The pattern is not mysterious. It is the same in classrooms, HR trainings, city halls, and comment sections: the majority culture is the only one required to perform self-erasure as proof of virtue. Everyone else gets heritage. Americans get a worksheet.
The correction, when it comes, will not be a seminar. Nations that poke the same bear for long enough eventually discover the bear was not theoretical. Between a rock and a hard place is still a place. Pretending the rock is a hug does not make it softer. It just guarantees the hug arrives later, and with worse manners.
