The Great American Potluck
America has always sold itself like a potluck dinner—“Bring your culture! Bring your grandma’s recipes! Bring the funky spices we can pretend we invented!” And for the most part, it works. The table is a weird, glorious mess of tamales sitting next to kielbasa sitting next to whatever the hell casserole the Midwest keeps reanimating using the dark arts of Cream of Mushroom soup. That’s multiculturalism: come as you are, add to the chaos, just don’t complain when your dish sits untouched because no one knows what it is.
Assimilation, on the other hand, is the HOA president at the potluck who insists everyone label their dish in English and reminds you that the flag should be visible from the serving line. It’s the nervous demand that the new neighbors promise to mow their lawn exactly the same way the old neighbors did, or else the property values—and probably democracy—will collapse overnight like a cheap Walmart tent.
The balance? It’s a knife edge, sharpened by history and dipped in someone’s grandma’s hot sauce.
On one side, you have the well-meaning multiculturalists who insist every cultural expression is sacred—even when it’s objectively terrible. These are the people who will clap enthusiastically for a fifteen-minute traditional dance performed with the same energy as a DMV line. They’re terrified of being the one person who says, “Hey, maybe we don’t need six different national anthems before kickoff.” They want the potluck to be infinite and uncurated, even if that means filling the table with twenty-seven versions of the same lukewarm rice dish because everyone is too polite to branch out.
On the other side, you have assimilation evangelists who want immigrants to absorb America like a Bounty paper towel commercial—swift, efficient, and without leaving streaks. Speak English, pledge allegiance, buy a pickup, stop scaring the neighbors with the goat sacrifice or whatever it is Fox News told them you do. Their vision of America is a Norman Rockwell painting duct-taped over a reality best described as “Waffle House at 2 a.m.”
The tricky part is that both sides are too terrified to admit the obvious: a culture can’t stay healthy if it’s only addition with no subtraction, and it can’t stay humane if it’s only subtraction with no addition. If you don’t let new ideas in, you get a stagnant monoculture that smells like boiled hot dogs and fear of pronouns. If you let everything in without any expectation of shared norms, you end up with a Tower of Babel built out of artisanal gluten-free despair.
A functioning society demands both: bring your grandma’s recipe, but also learn how not to set the kitchen on fire. Keep your traditions, but maybe drop the ones that involve misogyny, tribal blood feuds, or treating women like Wi-Fi extenders. Learn the common language—not because it’s superior, but because screaming into Google Translate isn’t a long-term civic plan.
Balance isn’t easy. But neither is the potluck. And we still show up because—when everybody contributes and nobody insists on rewriting the menu—damn, it tastes pretty good.
