Bilingualism and the Brett Kimberlin Way of Stopping It

I have stated this on Facebook a few times and even people who are supposedly on "the right side" of things often disagree with my tactics. You see, I am one of those people who grew up in the 70s and 80s - I am a Gen Xer. We didn't need to speak any other language other than English to function in society. Therefore just like those who are here legally and illegally who feel like they cannot and will not learn English (even though people for hundreds of years before have done so), I am taking the same tact. I refuse to learn a language that I was not immersed in at the age that I should have been immersed in it. Allow me to explain.

Although several linguists refute this, it seems that the optimum time to learn a language is from birth to puberty, when the brain is still open to certain stimuli. As the years go on, the mind closes itself off to new languages because it is a GIGO - garbage in, garbage out - type of computer. My first language is English. I was not told (or warned, as the case may be) that as a condition of employment thirty years in the future, that I would be required to speak two languages against my will and counter to my upbringing. It's unfair, it's defeatist, it's illogical, and it's not economically viable as lessons in Spanish would not be equatable to income potential. That is especially true if your skills are more prone to the administrative/secretarial/customer service side of things, as mine are. Imagine being able to type 100 words per minute and being rejected for job after job because you can't speak TWO languages.

One thing I have learned over the past several years is the squeaky wheels get the grease. Once upon a time, I went to school to become a paralegal. This in effect makes me just as dangerous as the prison flunkie wannabe lawyer-terrorist-blogger-pissant Brett Kimberlin, because I can file some lawsuits, too. As a matter of fact, I ought to teach a class on how it's done. Not a very difficult process, really. As Kimberlin has shown, you can cause a lot of problems based on absolute nonsense. I actually have a real beef. Imagine - even if corporations and companies win in court, they still spend on average of ten thousand dollars to remove themselves from litigation. It is victory through losing, because eventually they have to capitulate and accommodate. They can't afford not to. Does it mean fewer employees get hired and more have to be let go? Yes. It does. Is it self-serving? Probably. But I'm fed up with having my future dictated for me. I have a certain skill set and I would like to be able to use it. Of course, there are other things I can do (and I'm doing), but why should I?  So if a few companies have to suck it up and hire two people instead of one to bridge their language barriers, then so be it. After all, they're not hiring Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Quiche' speakers, and there are many people who speak those languages in the area where I live. Of course, they actually learn English (most of them, at least) because they knew that was the primary language spoken here. So did I, or so I thought.

So let the hate mail and the hand-wringing begin. Litigation is a lengthy process, but that's what happens when you have people sitting around with nothing but time and a computer. At least no one is getting SWATed anytime soon.