Dear Hearts and Gentle People

If I dial the phone one more time and hear Press "1" for English I will not be responsible for my actions.

This is America, dadgum it, and we speak English here, not Spanish, not Mongolian, not Swahili, not German, not Chinese, not Eskimo.

English. We speak English. We've spoken it for 230 years. It defines us. It unites us, and I'm sick and tired of the government trying to force feed Spanish down our throats.

We have one currency, one weights and measuring system, one set of rules for football, baseball, basketball, and tennis. We have one traffic system, and by golly, we should have only one national language.

Those of us in Georgia can communicate with Yankees in New York. Even though our sentences are peppered with "ya'lls" and theirs with "you guys," it's still English. We've communicated for centuries from coast to coast without interference with our language and I'm fed up with having to fumble through instruction sheets to find the one that I need that is printed in English.

I was in Wal-Mart last week and picked up a dozen eggs only to realize when I got home that written on the lid in bold letters were the words "Huevos Grandes Grado A." On my eggs! And the dadgummed things were packaged in Louisiana!

If I hadn't been in a bind and needed to whip up a cake in a hurry I'd have carried them back to Wal- Mart and demanded that they give me eggs labeled "Large Grade A Eggs, Hatched From Southern Born, Bred, and Brooded American Chickens…Guaranteed to Have Never Crossed the Road….let alone the border."

Our armed forces speak English. No matter their country of origin, American soldiers who fight for our freedoms speak English. In fact, it would be utter chaos if they didn't. Their very lives are dependent on absolute clarity in their day-to-day communications.

America must remain united by a common language. We should not be forced to choose between English and Spanish. It isn't my fault the government has allowed illegal immigrants to multiply like rabbits among us and I shouldn't have to cater to them either.

I worked at Lincoln County Elementary School for fourteen years and during that time we had several students whose parents were American citizens but were natives of other countries, India for one.

Their children spoke fluent Hindi but never in school. Unfortunately, there were no English-as-a-second language classes in our curriculum then as there are today. Instead, the Indian children at LCES worked harder and longer than most of the other students, learned to speak English fluently, and excelled in every subject, many going on to become top-honor graduates.

Funny, but not once did I pick up the phone during those years and hear Press "1" for English, "2" for Hindi. Yet, these dedicated hard-working, goal oriented students were willing to learn our language, hard though it must have been, simply because they and their parents were grateful to be living in the greatest nation on earth.

Why must we cater to those from other nations who willingly come to America to take advantage of the freedoms we enjoy? We welcome them with open arms, and rightfully so, but is it asking too much to expect them to learn our language? At the rate we're going how long will it be before we're pressing "1" for Spanish and "2" for English? How long before we Americans become secondclass citizens in our own country?

We are experiencing a linguistic nightmare and I keep waiting for government to wake up and realize that America as we once knew it is disappearing right before us and we must do something about it. And I don't blame the immigrants. I don't blame them because we Americans are the ones who are plastering every billboard and every piece of printed material with Spanish, many times in the place of English.

Mary Liz Nolan, news director for WGAC in Augusta, said last week that she was amazed on a recent trip to Disney World to see Spanish directions posted all over the park, and listed before and above English.

One of my favorite radio talk show hosts, Michael Savage, when asked what keeps America united, said this: "Our common English language." And on every one of his programs he emphasizes, "Borders, Language, Culture."

English is the language of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and it should be good enough for those who come to our country in search of a better way of life.

Lest you think I'm insensitive and narrow-minded I can assure you I am neither. If I had been born in a impoverished, dictatorial country I, too, would probably at some point be found swimming, crawling, or hitchhiking my way to America. Who wouldn't?

My daughter-in-law teaches kindergarten in a school in northeast Georgia and the majority of her class is Hispanic. The children come to her speaking Spanish. Most of them come from homes where family members converse in Spanish.

She loves those kids like they were her own, can speak Spanish almost as well as they, but she teaches them in English. They caught on amazingly fast at the beginning of school, she said, and most of them, though they may still speak Spanish at home, now speak fluent English in the classroom.

If foreigners want to come to America and become American citizens, more power to them. With a few exceptions most of them are hard workers and have attained their citizenship the legal way. They pay taxes, they vote, they contribute to the betterment of our country. Great.

All I ask is that I don't have to Press "1" for English or learn another language just to be able to communicate in my own country where, by the way, the official language is, and has always been, E-N-G-L-I-S-H. Comprende?