Coca-Cola sells sweet, fizzy drinks. This has been true since the company’s founding in 1892 and is decidedly uncontroversial.
The way Coca-Cola goes about persuading consumers to purchase Coke products, however, happens to be extraordinarily controversial.
During the Super Bowl, Coca-Cola unveiled an advertisement displaying Americans of various ethnicities doing a number of activities [especially, no surprise, drinking Coke].
While the video moved from scene to scene, the song “America the Beautiful” played, though [and here’s the controversial aspect] it wasn’t always in English.
Bits of the song were sung in seven different languages: Spanish, Tagalog, Hindi, Hebrew, Keres, Senegalese and English.
The ad prompted strong criticism from conservative commentators like Glenn Beck, who, when asked for his thoughts on Coca-Cola’s embrace of multiculturalism and multilingualism, stated “Why did you need that to divide us politically? Because that’s all this ad is.”
Of course, Twitter responses were particularly crude. “I thought we spoke English in America, not some Communist jibber-jabber,” tweeted one bitter critic, apparently unaware of the disconnect between language and political ideology.
It’s hard to discern how authentic such remarks are, but Beck’s comment, specifically, represents the fears of many Americans that the United States is fracturing due to the growth in diversity, be it in language or heritage.
But the great binding agent in American society is not language or ethnicity.
Nor is it, as some marketers assure, our love of Coca-Cola products.
What makes America a nation, what holds us together, is our firm, collective belief in equality, freedom and tolerance.
Thus, a Mandarin-speaking Chinese immigrant can truly be as American as a fifth-generation English-speaking American from Ohio.
One doesn’t need to know English or participate in a monoculture to have the values of freedom, equality and tolerance.
Indeed, the true threat to American nationhood is the ugly intolerance spewed forth following such wonderful displays of America’s great, cultural mosaic like that of Coca-Cola’s Super Bowl advertisement.
Such hateful comments threaten to dismember the nation, to break America into “a sheet of loose sand,” with the cement of our core values shattered.
America is far more beautiful when the rich cultural and linguistic diversity within its bounds are tolerated.
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