Thank You to new readers for stopping by my blog from these countries!
You know, my blog is about the Hungarian American experience and connection to the motherland of Hungary. But as we all know, due to war and politics, borders in these countries have been redefined many times as have the names of cities and towns which sometimes have three or four different language variations. "Ethnic" populations of Hungarians are in all these countries as are people of various "Ethnic" populations living within the borders of Hungary.
And in the United States people of Hungarian family origins are everywhere, though there are concentrations of Magyar-Americans in places where people who came during the industrial revolution resided.
There's a challenge because just about everyone is proud of (or at least not ashamed) of their ethnicity. WE CAN BE PROUDEST OF HAVING MUTUAL RESPECT for our similarities as well as our differences. I believe in the United States intermarriage has, one relationship at a time, made a big difference in how we think about what makes an American. There is a lot of diversity here. I have one friend who counts 6 different ethnicities in her blood; Irish, Polish, Croation, Hungarian, Slovak, German; in the United States we suspect that everyone has a "wee bit" Irish.
On Sunday I attended one of the many small community 9/11 memorial services in a big city. There were beautifully singing young girls, a bag pipe player, a violinist, and representatives from five different religions from Jewish and Moslem, to Catholic and Christian to New Age speaking, as well as representatives from the fire department and the police. It wasn't a spectacle but it was well attended. Fire department helicopters flew over in formation, the boy scouts carried flags, and the names of the 83 Californians who died in the terrorist attack were read, while 83 white doves were let out to fly around the park.
