How to preserve “your” culture.

Have a language or type of music or type of architecture or some other way of life that you consider part of YOUR culture and that you want to be preserved and celebrated? Here’s how you do that:

• Learn to be fluent in what you consider YOUR language: speak and write it correctly and regularly, read great works written in that language regularly, watch recorded and live presentations in that language regularly, and teach the language to your children and regularly expose them to it outside of your home.
• Learn about the food that is most common in your culture and how to prepare it, and learn why it became a staple in your culture.
• Go to performances of works presented in what you consider your language, or that include music or other art that you consider as originating from YOUR culture. Happily pay the entrance fee to experience such.
• Donate financially to and volunteer with nonprofits and community groups that work to present live performances in this language, and/or to distribute books and other publications in this language, or that present productions of music or other art that you consider as originating from YOUR culture.
• Buy books that focus on the art or architecture that you consider a part of YOUR culture. Know their origins. Don’t be surprised that such was influenced by OTHER cultures.
• Learn without limits the darker parts of your cultural history, and use the mistakes that have been made by your forebearers to be a better person in the here and now.
• Invite friends, neighbors, colleagues, elected officials and those running for office who are NOT a part of your culture to come to events so that they can experience what you consider YOUR culture and better understand and appreciate it.

Ways that don’t work to preserve your culture:

• Never going to what you would call “foreign restaurants.”
• Banning aspects of other cultures because you think they are a threat to your own.
• Refusing to listen to any music or experience any art at all from other cultures.
• Refusing to learn other languages.
• Banning the teaching of other languages and about other cultures in schools, or just completely defunding such classes so it can’t happen.
• Forcing other people to speak your language in absolutely any setting where you might be present because you think their language is somehow a threat to your culture.
• Assuming that, because you are a native speaker of a language, you don’t have to keep learning about that language.
• Denying that your forebearers have ever done anything inhumane or anything that should be condemned.
• Getting angry when someone you think is not from your culture enjoying or performing the music of YOUR culture, or otherwise participating in something representative of what you consider YOUR culture.
• Denying the significance of a culture different than your own.
• Denying that cultures existed before your own.
• Using violence.

If you are doing anything in that second set of suggestions, it means that your culture is weak from lack of your own support and it’s dying and, perhaps, it should.

I have national pride without nationalism. I have cultural pride without racism. IT’S NOT THAT HARD.