Walking into a restaurant I frequent in Austin on Jan. 20 a little after noon, a wry smile edged its way across my face.  On any day other than that of Donald Trump’s inauguration, most of the restaurant’s patrons eating alone face the television on the wall.  But not on Friday.  Every customer sat opposite the screen, defiant if not numb to the coverage from Washington.

Before I sat down in the order laid down by the opposition, I saw about five seconds of protesters somewhere fighting the police.  A sign of things to come.  The television that made Trump is going to destroy him, like the tiger that John F. Kennedy warned us in his inaugural address would consume ultimately anyone daring to ride it.

I saw nothing of that day’s usually grand events, which is odd, drawn to history as I am.  I will spend hours in front of the television watching things of historic importance, state funerals, for example, whether for a Kennedy, a Pope or a Reagan.  I watched Strom Thurmond’s funeral, for goodness’ sakes, one of the country’s most reprehensible racists.  Speaking of state funerals, I panicked when I heard that Queen Elizabeth II recently struggled to overcome a cold that sounded more like near-pneumonia, a dire threat to someone of that age, 91.

The idea of Trump going to England to represent the United States were the queen to die in the next four years appalls me.  Trump hauling his red hair and history with women into St. Paul’s Cathedral for a memorial service for one of the most respected figures of the last 100 years would be outright desecration.  And what about Pope Francis giving up the ghost during this specter of Trump? His arrival at so august a ceremony as a papal funeral corresponds to what this country has done to itself:  It went from electing a highly capable Hillary Clinton to empowering a ridiculous man, whose appointments to his Cabinet follow suit.

It is not the purpose of this space to regurgitate what we patently know about Trump’s Cabinet picks:  That across the board the men and women he selected for some of the highest offices of the land are so evidently out of their depth that our once-worry about the future is now real fear.

Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, did not know before he was nominated to be Secretary of Energy that on his shoulders would fall the responsibility of securing the nation’s nuclear arsenal.  Before I went to work at Energy as a speechwriter to a truly competent man whose desk Perry will now occupy, I myself did know about that particular part of the department’s portfolio.  Hard to believe that the governor of the nation’s premier energy-producing state did not.

Would that the Cabinet gathered only as a dance for dunces!  We could laugh them off and sit opposite our televisions in mirthful spite for a day or two.  But something more profound is at hand, and I am elated this Cabinet does not include a Hispanic/Latino.  No Hispanic/Latino of any note or reputation would want to be associated with what might well come from this crowd.  Should all go up in flames, we might be the ash of history but not responsible for it.

As important, I am glad that Hispanic/Latinos* are grasping – each day more thoroughly, deeply and communally – what Trump and most of his supporters think of our community of more than 58 million:  That we – the demonstrable demographic future of the nation – are not worthy nor important enough to be included in the Cabinet.  Into this oppressive quicksand of reality should be sinking those Hispanic/Latinos who voted for Trump, including a scant few friends of mine.

From this lack of inclusion in the Cabinet comes also an important lesson:  No Hispanic/Latino should ever feel that he or she is not entitled to occupy any office of the land at any level.  But we have to be better than that.  The bar has been set so low that we have to be conscientious about how we raise it in the future when this nightmare ends, hopefully without total devastation.

Observing the Cabinet selection and confirmation process reminded me that we shall never know how the Roman Senate would have reacted had the emperor Caligula named his favorite horse a consul of Rome, an office of superior rank then to that of Cabinet member today.  In our time, the U.S. Senate, being in Republican hands, already has proved too passive letting this Cabinet come into being when more is at stake than was two millennia ago.  An empire then, the whole earth today.

My sister Rosario texted me that she cried when she saw President Obama leave Washington.  But she and we should remember he will be back soon enough.  After a short vacation, he will join Eric Holder, his former attorney general, to lead the fight against the gerrymandered distortion of our congressional representational system that usurps the popular will.  It is the first step to turn this thing around.  And in the name of those three million more of we voters who formed the majority of the electorate in November, Obama will no doubt act to help stave off any direct madness that emanates from this already iniquitous administration.

Still, Obama and Holder and the millions they rally will need the likes of Sens. John McCain and Rob Portman and Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and other Republicans in the Senate to write their own profiles in courage to avert the clearest and most present danger of our lifetimes.

Heroes can hold in this time of dunces, before the horses.

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

*Hispanic/Latinos is not a typo. It is an editorial confection to overcome the rhetorical divide between those Hispanics who consider themselves not Latinos and those Latinos who do not consider themselves Hispanic.

If you do not follow European soccer, you cannot possibly know who Sergio Ramos is.  For the past two years, Ramos has used his head to score amazing goals at the most critical times for the most important sports team in the world, Real Madrid.  On Sunday, however, the great Ramos headed in a goal into his own net that ultimately cost Real victory.  We all at times score against ourselves.  It is in our nature.  Otherwise, we would be perfect.

Ramos came to mind on my drive back to Austin from San Antonio after paying my respects to the city’s former archbishop, Patricio Flores, who died last week.  In thinking about Flores and Ramos, I was not dwelling on loss so much as considering legacy.  Many more millions of people know who Ramos is than who Flores was.  Years from now Ramos will be remembered around the globe through video clips for his heroics on the field.  Flores will not be as noted nor remembered.  But, of course, it is not the life led nor the name known but that which we leave behind that matters.

Flores was one of those important men and women whom I have known who did matter.  The former Houston priest became the first Mexican-American bishop and archbishop in a land made Catholic by Spanish explorers centuries before and as such Flores heralded part of the beginning of the new chapter of the American story that we are now writing.  We are in a time in which we are going to have to provide a new intellectual context for the Hispanic/Latino community going forward.  It is no longer a question of who was first at this or at that.  It is the new not the old legacy that matters.

This reconsideration of ourselves was destined to start in Texas.  There was a reason why the first premier Hispanic/Latino social and political organizations were all established in San Antonio and South Texas.   However important, the overarching principles of those organizations of the last 50 years – civil rights, social justice, equal protection under law – were not enough.  The well-intended idea that the Hispanic/Latino community would achieve equal status and power by pursuing alone the guarantees of the Constitution ultimately has proved deficient.  We could soon be again where we were before Paul VI made Flores a bishop in 1970.

Whatever you might think of the election and the prospects of a Trump Presidency, we need a new perspective that defines our community and its purpose and gives it energy for the future at hand.  The great repression that might be headed our way will demonstrate the need for unity and action and it will foist on us a new sense of solidarity that, unintended or not, will re-enforce our self-identity.  I am not talking about organizing a separatist model but we need a new model of thinking within our system of democratic governance.

Neither you nor I nor anyone cannot escape what we now confront.  We will be compelled at last to find the voice we have never had but which is now possible because of our growing numbers.   To find a voice to resonate within ourselves, some of us will think of Patricio Flores. In building a new but cogent school of thought that  generates a mission statement that expresses a world view that everybody easily and naturally understands, we would bring purpose to a large mass of human beings still being formed.

The basic tenet of the new thinking has to be that key economy-driving states like Texas will fail if Hispanics/Latinos do not accelerate our social, economic and political progress.  And if those states fail, the nation will fall.  A larger, poorer Hispanic/Latino community will not be able to shoulder the cost of servicing the nation’s growing debt, supporting its aging population and paying for new defense systems in an increasingly dangerous world.

It is incumbent that Hispanic/Latinos* internalize our role in saving the country, and we must inculcate that belief within our community so that it is as common as the rising sun.  We must draw out and build upon the best within us more effectively and fully:  our sense of family, our desire for community, our congenital loyalty, our desire to belong.  More so, our efforts must rest on the need to foster self-confidence and self-belief in our students, and I believe that rests in restoring cultural pride.  The loss of our culture, including respect for our names and surnames, is complicit in our present state of being.

What lies ahead for the world in this new age in which religion matters less and yet matters more no one can know.  Church attendance and reverence is down; religious judgmental fervor rendered into partisan use and terrorist tool is up; indifference to what made religion important – faith – is quotidian, a universal, daily reality and subversive.

We must be careful, then, to use our heads well and not score against ourselves lest we lose the whole game and leave a last legacy.

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 Hispanics who consider themselves not Latinos and Latinos who do not consider themselves Hispanic.

The noise from Fadó (Fa-dough) – a rowdy Irish soccer bar in downtown Austin – ricocheted in my ears as I walked up Lavaca to get over to Colorado to my truck.  At the last minute, Real Madrid had rallied against Barcelona in el clásico, the most important annual sporting event on the planet.  The walkers-by outside on the streets under the Texas Capitol that Saturday morning in November had no idea that Real and Barça had played – and played more than a game.

At least twice a year, the two Spanish powers bring together 700 million people or more to form and experience a global event simultaneously in real time, generating the largest cache of the most precious commodity of our time:  Attention.  It is the new currency of the global realm.

Other than cash, the key to power these days is attracting attention.  Donald Trump would not have been elected otherwise.  If you gain attention, you gain votes, web hits and followers.  In the most attention-addicted country in the world, Trump prevailed.  He understood that with attention you can stir those once thought un-stirrable to now command global events.

We are indeed in a new time.  The global village becomes universal megatropolis, something George W. Bush’s failed to understand when he held the world in his hand after September 11, 2001.  Bush was no different then than most Americans strolling through life today.  In many ways, most of us really do not get it.  With the globe as his audience, Bush muffed it by shouting vengefully to workers upon a heap of rubble through a hand-help microphone rather than using that precious moment to undermine radical terrorists around the world with an inclusive message.  Barack Obama tried to recreate what Bush messed up when the newly-elected President went to Cairo in his first year in office to speak to the Muslim world.  But the moment of billions had passed.

Yet those moments will come again.  For it being only a game, when the clásico gathers 700 million people in all bends and corners and fields of the earth to sit down for two hours to share the same sensations emanating from one soccer stadium in Barcelona or Madrid, do they not create a global impact two times each year?

The very idea that the most watched annual event in the world is between two teams in Spain should be instructive in some way.  My sense is that even the Spanish government has no idea of its potential impact on a growing Hispanic Hemisphere.  Seven hundred million is about three times the number who will watch the Super Bowl next month.  And the vagaries of soccer in Europe could pit Madrid against Barça as many as six of times this year – almost five billion people.  The numbers astonish the mind.

Not astonishing is the disengagement of most Americans – specifically, too many Hispanic/Latinos* in the United States – from an event that demonstrates how state-of-the-art telecommunications could accelerate changes in our consciousness and self-perception.

My parents knew nothing of sports.  We barely had a television set.  But because I went to a Catholic high school in San Antonio – a megatroplis compared to my small hometown 300 miles away in the desert – what we call soccer became a part of my life.  One of our teacher-priests was from Spain.  His black cassock would turn brown in our dusty field on Saturday mornings as we learned the game.  I then would wait for ABC’s weekly Wide World of Sports in the afternoon hoping for reports about soccer in Europe.  Nothing, alas, about el clásico; mostly news from Wembley Stadium in London about English soccer games.

That we can now watch a game live from Madrid or Barcelona – or from Rio or Mexico City or Buenos Aires – means that while English grows as the dominant language of the world, the world is changing simultaneously.  Once seemingly small affairs like Real Madrid-Barcelona are no longer small at all.  Who could have imagined that a 26-year-old fruit seller named  Mohamed Bouazizi angry at the Tunisian government setting himself on fire in the rural town of Sidi Bouzid would set off the Arab Spring and plunge the world into tumult?

The clásico serves as a reminder.  It fixates Spain, Europe and most of the former Spanish colonies in the Americas, Africa and Asia but more so it underscores how far Americans and Hispanic/Latinos of the U.S. variety have to go before we become part of the new megatropolis, whose emergence must mean something new.  If we grow to become more aware of our new world, perhaps we might not be surprised when something unexpected happens or when we learn that we can affect world affairs.

I could watch the clásico at home.  But I would miss the crowd at the bar: The expressive Moroccans, the silent Germans, the dismissive Italians, the tense madridistas shouting for Real and the always-angry culés screeching for Barcelona, the engaged Mexicans and the quiet Ethiopians – and the raucous Irish.  I would miss the world.

The next clásico is in April.

I will be waiting for Fadó.

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.