Boy kicked out of scouts for refusing to swear allegiance to god

[kılıç_mehmet]

Why would you leave your identity behind? No one asks you to do this. My family certainly didn't. Boogeyman?

And how well do you preserve any distinct traditions practiced by the...whomever you descend from?
However, that's totally besides the point. If everyone did maintain their own seperate identities in the US, you'd now have innumerable ethnic enclaves, where the respective languages of those communities would be official languages, and taught in school, with having their respective flags flying over autonomous parliaments.
It was due to this that you had your civil war, to bring those people under a single national identity, forcing them to discard their old identity for a new one. Obviously, everyone knows from whom they come from, even I'd probably know that I'm a Turk even if I were born and raised in the US, but how well would I be able to maintain our distinct customs in the US? If I were a recent immigrant, well, that would have been probably easier, but I still would have to change my identity to conform with the new one I just took up.

Even in my three years in Germany, I had to overlook many of my own customs and conform with the customs of the Germans, in order to better integrate into society. People of older generations on the other hand could not do this. Therefore, they interacted very little with those other than themselves, precisely because they have not shed their own customs in favor of the integration, and eventually, assimilation process.