Finding a bond where non exists

Subject: Finding a bond where non exists.

Watching out of a window in the TownHall in East Ham yesterday I committed the sin of contrasting the society I saw with the one of 50 years ago. The school children passing in the street were neat and tidy, disciplined by three attack dog teachers determined no harm would come of their precious cargo. 
The make up of the kids was largely Indian / Bangladeshi, a sprinkling of Pakistani, a few Chinese and one rather sad looking white girl. Another class came by with a similar mix and then a third. Our demographic is not changing it has changed and with it the texture of this part of the British Isles. 
Multiculturalists will say this is a good thing as we internationalise our society to represent the world who have come and settled on our shores. In fact I would be accused by some of committing heresy for even allowing the thought to exist, 'was this new society ever debated' with the previous incumbents of these streets and houses or were  the previous occupants flotsam in an economic experiment  which was too important for 'ordinary people' to grasp.
And what of the Bangladeshi lady, does she accommodate the Chinese man or the Turkish woman in her sense of her community or is she just as perplexed as the old lady sitting in the cafe eating her bacon sandwich. Does the term multiculturalism mean anything to any of them, or are they likely to scuttle off home to a sideboard of photographs showing their real home and the extended family left far behind.
Of course the multiculturalist will point to the children born and brought up, not far from the sound of Bow Bells, as being the true multiculturalists, the beneficiaries of the great economic experiment which uprooted the West Indian from Trinidad or the Nigerian from Lagos, the Filipino from Manila all to seek a "better life" in Britain. These children will grow up not shackled to their past traditions but simply forge a new identity amongst the polyglot of language and identity to form a new one, a sort of bastardised new world identity in which no roots run really deep. 
The children do of course form clusters as associations are made through family ties and the assumption that marriage will still bond the family to the customs of another home, another flag. 
Assimilation was the hope and dream of the designers of our new culture, each taking the best out of their own and assimilating, as if by osmosis the best of the others. But it seems that a remarkably tight bond exists in each of these expat societies, bonds of family name, bonds of caste, bonds of nationalism each a determinate on how well the multicultural experiment will work. 
I felt a little sorry for the one white child as she alternated between the groups, groups who so easily corresponded with each other but she like the free electron, without a home,  her attraction spent on trying to find a a bond where non existed.