Tsuris, tsuris, I bought a couple shares;
If I was in business, I’d be a millionaire.

- Yiddishe Cup Klezmer Band

I’ve got enough tsuris (Yiddish for aggravation, worries) to be a millionaire. While attending my hometown of Dayton, Ohio’s annual “CityFolk” Festival, I realized how the evidence in front of my very face so obviously contradicted the outrageous claims that America is an “Apartheid” state made up of “morons.”

Yes, the professional CityFolk performers were an extremely diverse group, including Yiddishe Cup Klezmer Band (Cleveland), Natalie MacMaster (Cape Breton, Canada), D'Gary (Madagascar), Lonnie Brooks (Chicago), Ologunde (Bahia, Brazil), and Feufollet (Louisiana). But their diversity paled in comparison to the Daytonians in the audience. There were leather-clad Harley biker dudes and dudettes, snappily-dressed suburbanites (some East Indian, others German or Anglo-Saxon), and Trippie Hippies. Amongst the Lebanese, Irish, African, Anglo-Saxon, Jewish, Amish, Mennonite, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, German, and Appalachian faces of the old Dayton were the faces of the new Dayton -- Hispanic, East Indian, Arab, Pakistani, Somali, Vietnamese, etc.

There were no fights. There were no suicide bombings. Just the opposite. People were having a great time. I hate to use clichés, but it was all very harmonious.

Several local corporations, like Lexis-Nexis and NCR, made substantial donations to CityFolk organizers thus enabling free admission to any and all who wished to attend. 100,000 people attended over three days out of a metro area of approximately 900,000 people. These corporations gave their employees time off if they volunteered to help out at the festival. Pretty nice. Three days of world-class music for free. But isn’t corporate America supposed to be the root of all evil? I guess one could sit around nit-picking over corporate motivations but, hey, that’s the definition of enlightened self-interest. It works.

I am not a self-loathing American who cannot appreciate the wonders this country offers to its citizens like diversity, political freedom, economic freedom, and virtually unlimited opportunity (just try to get a small business loan in Deutschland). Unlike the left-wing American extremists, I have no common ground with Eurabian pinkos who find the U.S. and Israel to be “the greatest threats to world peace” (or is that “world peas?”). Anyone who's been to Israel has experienced a free and open melting-pot, but with probably more left-wing influence than the U.S. Jews came/come to Israel from Iraq, Germany, Poland, Ethiopia -- every part of the world. And there are the Druze, Bah'ai, Christians, Palestinians, etc.

It’s hilarious to watch those self-loathers excoriate the system in which they flourish -- even though they’d be the first to have their throats slit by the Islamists. They drive around in polluting automobiles while bashing Americans who drive SUV’s. If you put an “activist” bumper sticker on your car, does that make the pollution go away? They scream about minority and women’s rights here in the U.S., but turn a blind eye to the awful treatment of women (e.g., in Saudi Arabia) and minorities (e.g., the Kurds) in Arab/Muslim dictatorships. Is this the kind of diversity that should be respected? Sheesh.

My tsuris stemmed not from the harmony of CityFolk, but from consternation over how the left-wing/5th column/politically correct can’t seem to even notice what glares so obviously right under their noses. These self-loathers need to check themselves into a 12-step program for awareness rehabilitation. And who said the U.S. didn’t have problems? But I mean… really. The self-loathing Americans and the U.S.-bashing Eurabians have gone too far.