Press 1 if you wish to continue in a language other than English

Now, I can usually pretty well roll with the punches. But there really are a few things that get hung up in my craw.

One of those things is the endorsement, by a large and growing segment of American businesses, of the use of English as a second language for communication.

Whenever I call a business, for the purpose of purchasing or inquiring about a product, and I get the message “to continue in English, press 1,” I immediately hang up. This is the United States of America — what the Sam Hill language do they expect I’ll be using?

For over 200 years, we have been an English-speaking nation, and those who came to these shores adopted our language as their own. The Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, French, Germans, Slovaks, Welsh, Scots, Danes, Dutch, Belgians, Norse, Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Greeks, Serbs, Slavs, Austrian, and those from Africa and Asia who spoke a language other than English soon assimilated and became a part of the fabric of our nation.

They may have settled in enclaves of those who spoke their native language, but they soon learned and used English as their means of communicating with other Americans. We must not forget that those who were here before the taking of their land did not speak English either, yet they also learned the language of the invaders.

I happened to be looking through a list of holidays listed for the year 2010 and a couple caught my eye. One was “Cinco de Mayo.” Now I’ve been aware of it for some time, but for it to show up in a holiday listing for the United States of America defies belief.

Cinco de Mayo commemorates a victory by the Mexican militia over the French army at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. What does that have to do with the United States? Even in Mexico it is primarily a regional holiday in the Mexican state of Puebla with limited recognition elsewhere.

Why don’t we celebrate, with a holiday, the date of April 21, 1836, when the Texans defeated the Mexican army at San Jacinto and won their independence? At least Texas is now a part of the United States.

Or maybe celebrate Sept. 13, 1847, when we defeated the Mexicans at the Battle of Chapultepec. How about Feb. 15, 1898, when the Spanish blew up the battleship Maine in the harbor at Havana? It did not take us long to avenge that event by defeating the Spanish — shouldn’t we have a holiday to commemorate it?

I also noted in the list of holidays where we have a “Hispanic Heritage Month.” Where is the listing for Scottish or French or German or Italian or any other ethnic heritage month to be found?

Do we want to continue to encourage this folly and have an ethnic divide similar to that of Canada where a gulf exists between the English-speaking and the French-speaking Canadians? In the United States of America, English is not the second language.

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AN OLD SOLDIER LAID TO REST: Col. Lewis Lee Millett, CMOH (see my Star-Exponent column from Sept. 27) was buried with full military honors at Riverside National Cemetery in California Dec. 5. More than 1,000 friends and comrades attended the ceremony, including seven Congressional Medal of Honor heroes. Gen. Abrams, commanding general at Fort Irwin, Calif., presided at the service.

Culpeper was represented by Jerry R. Beckett, Army command sergeant major retired, who is the present commander of American Legion Post 330 and who served with Col. Millett in Vietnam. Beckett was asked to deliver one of the eulogies.

Bayne’s column runs every Sunday.