Is multiculturalism a failed experiment? It’s a question I’ve been pondering for some time now; sometimes I pick it up off of the floor of my head to examine it for a while before I drop it to rattle around the corners of my head. I recently came to an impasse.

I realized that the “experiment of multiculturalism” has yet to begin.

It is not enough to just let other races reside in the same sphere of existence that is America, and that’s exactly what is going on right now. We have grudgingly allowed those other than white Anglo-Saxon people to come to our nation, and they have brought culture with them. America’s silent majority have either accepted these cultures with varying degrees of awkward approval or just turned their nose up to them with disdain.

This is not the experiment, though. The experiment of multiculturalism isn’t, “They can come here and adapt to us, to our way of life, and figure it out somehow.” The experiment will involve the paradigm that is currently established of white culture dominance changing dramatically.

Yesterday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said some things that I found to be a little disheartening. As was reported by the BBC, the German cultural update went something like:

Merkel told a gathering of younger members of her conservative Christian Democratic Union party on Saturday that at “the beginning of the ’60s, our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country.”

She added: “We kidded ourselves a while, we said: ‘They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone’, but this isn’t reality.

“And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other … has failed, utterly failed.”

After reading this I thought for sure that this had to be some kind of peripheral, iconic person in Germany; maybe some kind of senator saying something a little off-color. Turns out the Chancellor of Germany is the head of Germany’s federal government.

It’s kind of surreal that anyone of high position in the German government would say something like that, but it’s not like we get to pretend like our thought process as Americans never resembles this.

Merkel is sure to represent the business aspect of things, when she articulated that, “We should not be a country either which gives the impression to the outside world that those who don’t speak German immediately or who were not raised speaking German are not welcome here.” Again, this was reported by the BBC.

I really wish I could have talked to the guy who reported on it before he wrote the article. I mean, does Germany not realize that it’s kind of ironic that they are saying this? I wonder how that invisible elephant in the room got addressed behind closed doors.

The immediate easy solution is, “Well, they just have to learn the language.”

In fact, no, they don’t have to learn the language. Not only this, immigrants by and large don’t need permission to get into a country. America is a great example of this. If our brothers and sisters south of the border want to come across, guess what, they can walk across.

Should there be a national language requirement? If we are going to start mandating a culture to our citizens just to make things “easier,” why don’t we go ahead and mandate a national religion and political affiliation as well?

Differences can be inconvenient, but they are a fact of life. They aren’t going away. We need to learn to live with each other.

Let the multicultural experiment begin.