He is a nephew of my sister’s by marriage.  He has worked for decades for the CIA.  I presume he is still there.  I have not seen him since he was a toddler.  And that was 45 years ago, at least.  I would not know the Nephew if he walked in the door.  Nor do I know his politics.

Neither do I know what the Nephew does for the agency.  I do not want to know.  All I know is the agency posted him to places where we have vital interests and are known to have defended them.

I presume he has put his life at risk.  I wish I could call him and ask what he thinks of Donald Trump dissing the CIA’s conclusion that Russia directly interfered with the Nov. 8 elections.  History will record that Russia caused the best qualified candidate in a long time to lose and the worst qualified candidate ever to win.  Sen. John McCain is right: Russian involvement is a form of warfare.

I bet it rankles the Nephew that Trump is not taking full advantage of the briefings he should be receiving, information for which members of the CIA are risking their lives — today — while Trump meets with Kanye West.

I am so proud, yet worried when I think about it, that the Nephew knows more about world affairs and our national security than the president-elect of the United States.  The Nephew is one of too few Hispanic/Latinos* in the actual game.  Hispanic/Latinos lag in engagement and presence across the entire foreign policy and intelligence establishment.  No Hispanic/Latino diplomat in the nation’s history has excelled at the highest level in the handling of American foreign policy.

Development and management of foreign policy is the area of government in which Hispanic/Latinos might be the most underrepresented.  Some have used theatrics to project themselves as foreign policy experts but few people take them seriously. Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeleine Albright, George Marshall they are not.

The short- and long-term implications are serious.  In the short-term, if had we an experienced corps of Hispanic/Latino diplomats, active and retired, they might help mitigate how NAFTA is going to be recast by the least-knowledgeable chief executive in our lifetimes, how immigration policy might be managed and how the impact of the plutocrats Trump is appointing to government might be ameliorated .  In the long run, we will not have enough foreign policy experts to help change, reform or reorient current U.S. foreign policy in the years ahead if — and most likely when — Trump comes up a cropper.

Trump in dealing with Russia, China and Israel already has shaken up the country’s foreign policy arrangements of long standing.  By empowering Russia, basically recognizing Taiwan and perhaps now moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, Trump is going to leave the world a vastly more complicated place for many, many years.  This could mean the beginning of a Thirty Years War on top of the almost Twenty Years War we have fought since September 11, 2001.

And who shall pay the mounting bills?  Hispanic/Latinos?  The very group whose economic and social progress almost surely will be laid waste by a Trump administration and Republican governors and Republican-controlled legislatures across the nation?  The very group that is growing and on whom the nation should depend as the white, non-Hispanic/Latino population declines in share and number?

In the span of four hours on the evening of Nov. 8, our future overnight became evermore dangerous, evermore costly and evermore painful.  No scenario is out of bounds over the next four years.

I do not know at what age the Nephew signed up for duty to serve his country.  I doubt his colleagues and he signed up for their years of dangerous, perilous work to be devalued.  But I hope they keep working and not wander off into much-deserved retirement – not yet.

If he survives the mess Trump seems on the precipice of creating, perhaps the Nephew will be at the right age, time and place to manage the aftermath.

If he were, that probably would be good.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

*Hispanic/Latinos is not a typo. It is a run-in to overcome the rhetorical divide between Hispanics who are not Latinos and Latinos who are not Hispanic.

From the roof of a hotel at night two years ago, the emerald city below looked destined to unfold as the new capital of the hemisphere.  Knowing what we know about the ongoing economic and demographic integration of the hemisphere, Miami in our lifetimes might still become the new geostrategic center of the 50 or so nations of the Americas.

I thought of my nocturnal musings when news came that Donald Trump’s nominee to direct the Environmental Protection Agency does not believe climate change poses a threat, even as more-knowing homeowners sell their homes in Florida and businesses begin to hedge their bets.  I know this to be true because I had called a friend in southern Florida the week before the election seeking reassurance that Hillary Clinton was going to win the state.

My friend is a seasoned professional, and she had been working for an adjunct of the Clinton campaign for almost a year, and so I was not expecting to hear Clinton was going to lose.  I certainly was surprised to hear, however, that she had sold her house, which she had owned for many years.   “You’re kidding.  Why?” I asked.  “Too close to the water,” she responded.  “But you love that house.”  She became poignant for a moment before regaling me with her troubles when even mild tropical storms push ocean waters her way. “It’s real,” she said of climate change.  And sad.  I grew to love Miami when I lived there. Somewhere in storage in San Antonio is a white Gatsby-like hat I used to wear when I went there to recover from the aftermath of the election of 2000.

I did a pretty good job of recuperating from an election that Al Gore would have won over the disastrous George W. Bush but for Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.

Miami would be a mirage playing off the waters of South Beach were it not for the traffic.  Without the noise and bustle of visitors, languages and commercial transactions across nations and islands, the light that bounces off the many colors of the city’s buildings creates an eternal rainbow that camouflages an economic powerhouse of immense and global potential.

From atop my hotel, the city dazzled me again.  Most people can visualize Miami as generally the midpoint between Alaska and the southern-most part of South America.  As important, though, is that most of South America rests east of the United States, in time zones more conjoined with Europe and Africa.  Almost all of Central America itself is east of Texas – a difficult concept for Americans who use south of the border to mean anything south of the Rio Grande all the way to Tierra del Fuego in Chile.

Spread across miles of light at night, it seemed to me that Miami, blessed eons ago by the caprice of a small break in the continental plates, was making the best of geology, geography, time and, now, demography to become a super city in the age of globalized trade.  The demographics of Florida and of Miami have fast-become more representative of the rest of the hemisphere than traditional Cuban redoubt.  The blinking lights in near and far signaled the city was about to take center stage in hemispheric affairs – and perhaps more.

Yet it seems the marvel of Miami might one day be our age’s Atlantis, the mythical city said to have disappeared into a watery grave.  The very waters that make Miami so splendid now threaten its very existence.  The sense of the city’s growing grandeur itself might be mirage.  Miami’s dreams could be undone, inundated slowly by the very sea that shimmers day and night.

Or they could be swept away instantly next year or the summer thereafter by the growing size and anger of hurricanes made more powerful and more frequent by changes in water temperature and the climate.  Had Gore won the election 16 years ago, Miami and we might have stood a better chance.  Still, we need to convince the Senate to reject an EPA nominee so divorced from the reality of homeowners selling their homes already.  Certainly, Sen. Marco Rubio has an interesting vote to cast.  Perhaps we who love Miami should give him a call.

When I think back to that night high above the city, I was not Gatsby.  But I did want the emerald, elegiac light to mean more than it did to him.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

I often am asked to identify the most important issue facing the Hispanic/Latino population that has led the country’s demographic transition into the new America our country has fast become.  Defaulting automatically to education, jobs, health care, immigration and equal protection of the laws is easy – so critical are they to how we move forward.

Yet preeminent in my thinking is the media and its workings, both the new and the old.  The Hispanic/Latino narrative, already astonishingly absent in one is being trampled by the other at precisely the wrong time in history.  And greater inattention looms as large events and a larger President suck in all the oxygen in the public space.

Without appropriate measures of media and informational input into a society as diverse as ours, its democratic output is dubious – ultimately threatening economic growth when economic progress is the key to securing the nation’s future.  To that most gracious end, then, the success of the Hispanic/Latino population is indispensable, for we are more of America than we ever have been and only more so each passing day.  And each day that passes, we do not get back.

In order for Hispanic/Latinos* to succeed, public and national attention must be a positive force, expanded and calibrated to complement our progress.  More, not less, reporting of the Hispanic/Latino story;  more, not less, production of films; more, not less, publishing.

Until we weave the importance of the Hispanic/Latino population into the national consciousness as part of the nation’s lifeline, Hispanic/Latino concerns are flotsam in a sea of partisan hyperbole.  I mean, who can have a serious discussion about the existential challenge of education when more than half of the country thinks most Hispanic/Latinos are in the country illegally?

Without a wide and truthful – and consistent – exposition of the importance of the Hispanic/Latino community to the country, none of the conventional issues matter.  Not enough Hispanic/Latinos will get better educations.  Employment in the lower ranks of the second-largest economy in the world will persist.  Health care will be hit-or-miss, depending on local governmental funding of emergency rooms in public hospitals.  Immigrants will remain vulnerable to economic exploitation and racist attack.  And social and political equality will remain chimera.

Many of the people who run the news business also run the entertainment business, and they are cut from the same slab of media meat.  Holding up their lack of engagement in and knowledge of the Hispanic/Latino community for embarrassment will not prove effective if they truly do not understand the importance of the story.  Since so many of these executives seem unmoved even though they are told repeatedly that Hispanic/Latinos already mean much to their bottom line, they can only represent – to our great fear – how far behind the rest of the country lags in understanding the emerging place of the Hispanic/Latino in history.  After all, the man elected to lead our armed forces knew only after being told by a journalist what constitutes the nuclear triad.

If inattention and failure of awareness in the old, mainstream media were not enough of a problem for us, we have now the invasion of the unregulated, unedited swamp that is the internet with which to contend.  Its loathsome loosening of anger and fear multiplies by many factors hate against minorities of any kind, including Jews and Muslims, and complicates by many more factors the kind of public discussion we need to have in these perilous times.

It is hard to fathom that we have sunk into a netherworld in which soulless individuals fabricate news, and these fake news “stories” reach significant parts of the public, which reads and absorbs them in an echo chamber ever more closed with each reinforcing untruth.  Harder to believe is that the effort to undermine responsible journalism is led by none other than the president-elect, who fabricates numbers and data out of thin air and threatens the press and the First Amendment – on the record.

The lack of a common sharing and acceptance of basic truths and facts across society well spells a point of no return, for with it goes the sense of community vital to a democratic republic.  This genie hardly seems the type to return to the bottle voluntarily.  The furies of the times, in fact, give it tornadic dimension.

However male and white the founders of the republic thought an informed citizenry should be, these men, in fact, were exceptionally informed and well-read.  They produced extraordinary documents that organized a free country that with free markets powered itself into economic and global success and, slowly but surely, to greater social equality.  Does anyone think that a constitutional convention convened today could actually produce again The Constitution of the United States?  Quite to the contrary, sinister forces, creating their own sources and data, are propounding the nonsense that being of native birth in the United States does not carry with it automatic citizenship.  Wow.

Years ago, when the phrase Information Age came into vogue, I wrote in an editorial that it more likely heralded an age of disinformation.  I was laughed at then.  But, oh the travails of Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook!  He now has to manage how to zero out the fake news that spreads through the company’s countless labyrinths as like a plague to all corners of the known world.  Unlike the plague of old that festered in the bad sewers of a Europe that had not caught up to the growth of its population, the modern media plague has no easy fix.  Building conduits for raw sewage is simple; channeling the hate-filth of the internet not so much.

I am often amused by the operatives and the titans of the news, entertainment and publishing world who more often than not blame budgets, etc. for not hiring, promoting, acquiring Hispanic/Latino talent in any form that might help stem this drift.  Which means there is room and a place only for themselves.  But I am not amused when high men and women do not get the more important story: That without the Hispanic/Latino population succeeding, the country is doomed.

I once had the editorial page editor of The Washington Post suggest over lunch he did not have room on his staff for a full-time columnist writing on Hispanic/Latino affairs because ‘I doubt there would be much to write about for a whole week.’  It is tough to get through at times even to enlightened men and women in charge of fateful things.

These days, when I am asked for my advice or counsel, Eugene O’Neill’s play, from which the title for this post emanates, comes to mind.  O’Neill, through the iceman, forces his characters to labor and live under unending self-destructive illusions that they cannot escape other than through death.

We live now in an age of unending illusion, not news.

Yet, only by pounding away at the mainstream media to raise the correct, full implications of the Hispanic/Latino narrative, do we – or Zuckerberg, for that matter – stand a chance.

For the moment, though, all media is killing us.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

*Hispanic/Latinos is not a typo.  It is a run-in confection to overcome the rhetorical divide between those Hispanics who are not Latinos and those Latinos who are not Hispanic.