As Important as the Khans

Reports that Donald Trump almost matched Hillary Clinton in raising money for the month of August for his campaign should alarm everyone.  In the end, the news could overshadow the events leading up to and after the Republican and Democratic national nominating conventions.

The money Trump raised in July, about $82 million, came mostly from small donors.  If Trump can harness the full potential of his base, he could turn around a race he is currently losing.  If it is about the money, Hispanic/Latinos need to take note.

Trump has made religion and the color of one’s skin a cornerstone of his campaign though he might deny it.  He is close enough to the White House for Hispanic/Latinos to make a trip to the credit union if necessary.  After all, as I have said before, this election is an existential matter.  It was and is for the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan.

Trump as President is an immediate, direct threat to the existence of many in our community.  More so, he endangers the existence of the republic and our democratic form of government that in the end could endanger the very existence of humankind itself were he to get his hands on the handles and gears of war or delay us in making hard decisions about climate change.

Forget the rising oceans for now.  It should be enough for Hispanic/Latino parents to worry about their sons and daughters once again being shipped out to war to return mangled or killed or their skins and minds damaged in more ways than one.

It should be enough for Hispanic/Latinos — especially veterans who have voted Republican — to be repelled by someone who mocked a Gold Star mother; got his hands on a Purple Heart even though he got five deferments from serving in Vietnam; denigrated prisoners of war; and called a general who served all of his life in the military a failed person.

Imagine Donald Trump meeting flag-draped coffins at Dover.  Of what possible comfort could he be to a family in tears, this man for whom empathy is so distant?  Imagine the rage for any war-deaths that result from the decisions of a President who knows nothing about foreign policy but can command troops into battle.  How long before a constitutional crisis would ensue?

Against that backdrop and in tandem with our lower voter and electoral participation rates, Hispanic/Latinos have never contributed in any significant way to political campaigns.  Most Hispanic/Latino households do not have $25 lying around to give to anyone, much less a presidential campaign.  Worse still, high-net-worth Hispanic/Latinos have not been especially supportive either.

It is time for everybody to give.  This race could turn.

Bernie Sanders raised tens of millions of dollars in small sums from millions of contributors, many of whom never had given to a campaign.  Likewise, Trump’s campaign coffers could explode overnight despite his plunging poll numbers.  Hillary Clinton since her convention has opened up a significant lead over Trump in national surveys of registered and likely voters.  But that should neither excuse nor preclude us from giving.  Candidates with larger leads than Clinton’s today have lost.

As a group, Hispanic/Latinos cannot give much, but one million Hispanic/Latinos averaging $25 now and in September and October amounts to $75 million.  That is a lot of money but hardly enough.  Nevertheless, it will be money well spent, especially if the economy and the stock market were to tank were Trump to win.

Instead of giving up two hours of wages or so, many Hispanic/Latinos might have to give up their jobs — or much more.

Like the Khans, we have a lot of skin in the game.

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

At Year’s End, the Enduring HispanicLatino Story

So the year ends and so does this blog on a regular three-times-per-week basis.  In the year that begins tomorrow, change and events will continue to rock our world.  Sadly, television too soon will break into our lives with news of another mass shooting.  The possibility that Israel will launch its already-planned attack on Iran’s nuclear installations becomes probability as each day passes.  By the end of the spring, the fragile economy might have been harassed back into recession by obdurate House Republicans whose political near-sightedness obscures the electoral razor atop their noses.  Still, despite the immediacy of these events, the most transcendental if not outright existential story for the country remains how HispanicLatinos develop socially, economically and politically.  And so from time to time a thought or two on the subject will appear in this same space.

The beginnings of the HispanicLatino storyline appear old already.  The drumbeat of demographic change has become monotony.  Yet the story is just beginning.  The objective of this blog, which began in the late summer of 2011, intended to advance foundational thought and reflection beyond the routine talking point of a Hispanic/Latino population remaking the country.  HispanicLatinos, after all, will prove more important than the next mass shooting or the combined competitive evolution in the near future of the Brazilian, Chinese, Indian and Mexican economies.  HispanicLatinos must succeed for America to survive.

The HispanicLatino phenomenon, though, is not easily captured.  It seems an apparition in slow-motion, though it is not.  Millions of HispanicLatinos are making millions of individual decisions in their lives daily – from diet to debt – that in the long run will be more important than whether the European Union survives.  The composite meaning of those decisions escapes the attention it deserves for many reasons, not the least of which is the slow, drawn-out understanding by HispanicLatinos of their importance to the country.  The failure of the majority of HispanicLatinos to not understand the historic proportion of their existence relative to the rest of the population threatens the country.  It is, in fact, a matter of national security.

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Amid the Chaos, the Fire of Promise

The end of the year holds promising signs for the country and HispanicLatinos – unless the Republican-held House of Representatives drives the global financial markets into turmoil and drags the economy back into recession and/or various foreign crises detonate.  If not for the fiscal cliff, the nation should be able to look forward to start moving again and leaving the blight of the disastrous Bush years behind – finally.  With wars ending (and hopefully none soon aborning) and the economy slowly eating away at the remaining distressed properties in an improving housing market, the country can begin to assess what it needs to do to fix itself for the years ahead.  Finding the will to rebuild its infrastructure, expand its domestic energy supply and strengthen its educational systems, the nation can deliver on its promise.

Though it takes courage to tackle the issues at hand, a strong economy can salvage much.  With the Bush Recession slowly lifting, the oft-misused phrase “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” comes closer to being true.  No country’s economy is better positioned to explode – and burn with a flourish.  Some of the country’s travails – a plague of obesity, students saddled with hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, a corrupted Washington, a broken immigration system, an increasingly farcical Supreme Court – are redeemable.  For that precise reason, HispanicLatinos need to step up their efforts to help resolve the challenges that vex the country.

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Forward? Perhaps. Perhaps Not.

It seems inconceivable.  Republican leaders in Washington and elsewhere do not get how dangerous the fire they are playing with is.  On almost every front – ranging from the disaster of the fiscal cliff to the submarining of President Obama’s governmental nominations to the prosecution of Benghazi to control of dangerous weaponry that kill kids to contraception to defending millionaires’ tax bills – Republicans are the ancien régime before its collapse in France.

It is one thing to not understand that the country no longer agrees with their positions on everything from taxes to gay rights to woman’s choice to climate change.  It is quite another thing to not realize that the country is ready to move on.  For Republicans, the latter is the more dangerous.  Since the country knows what it believes and thinks, when it decides to move on, it will and start leaving the past behind – and it has.

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When Small Should be About Something Bigger

The political bickering over the fiscal cliff looks small, and it is, in comparison to the larger demographic cliff the country already has sailed over with greater implications by far.  The fiscal crisis in Washington today is just the beginning of the deeper financial plunge ahead – unless the economy is transformed to create new jobs with better-than-average wages to increase revenues, that is to say, expand the middle class.  The Congress and the President can negotiate tax rates but they can do little about the birth, death and obesity rates changing the country and its fiscal foundations far more profoundly than current balances in the federal government’s accounts.

The largest of the combined financial problems, of course, are Medicare and Social Security – whose futures look problematic since the elderly are living longer, minorities are not earning enough to support these programs and the young are incurring obesity-related health-care costs scores of years before they should.  When looked at analytically, the precise importance of the HispanicLatino population to the nation’s future becomes glaring.  You do not have to know the actuarial and budgetary numbers to understand that the current fiscal abyss is part of the much larger problem.  You cannot expect a growing HispanicLatino population with low, static incomes to support the growing cost of everything.

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First heal then rebuild

Ceaselessly, the babble goes on about the crossroads the Republican party faces after its rejection by almost 64 million voters.  And, of course, the discussion misses the point. The usual post-election hand-wringing in the wake of a political defeat has gone beyond usual recrimination.  Desperation has turned bitter.  Ill-informed and/or cynical political strategists and pollsters had hoodwinked the party’s faithful into thinking they were going to win an election with a nominee who truly considers half of the nation way, way beneath him.  Despondency has conflated into screeching on the radio about the old America dying.  The resentments that right-wing gasbags with microphones spew into the air unfortunately cloud the opportunity that America has before it.

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Before Legacy, Think Opportunity

With the election over, there is no question we have entered the age of the new demography in which the changing internal populations of countries are remaking their politics.  HispanicLatinos, millennials, African Americans, independent women, gays and lesbians and a host of fair-minded voters not blinded by religious fervor or abject racism came together and delivered a good win for President Barack Obama.  The uncertainty is whether the United States will give itself the chance to take advantage of its demographic transformation to secure its future.   In that sense, we have entered a new age of opportunity.  But it is also clear we have entered the age of climate change.  The assertion of the new demography came simultaneously with Hurricane Sandy that should have blasted smugness for all time.

If I may, a personal, self-serving note: If Florida, as expected, is finally given to Obama, it will confirm the call I made on October 29 that nailed the election’s outcome on the button in the Electoral College.  On the popular vote, I was also very close.  I said the spread between Obama and Mitt Romney would be three million votes.  The spread currently stands at about 2.7 million.  You can read that blog at:

http://www.hispaniclatino.com/2012/10/29/channeling-harry-truman-an-obama-win/

Now, after the election, what?  The first few days are important for President Obama and will determine if the nation does push forward.

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Ethnicity and Race Do Matter — and Thank God

Let’s say you are a young HispanicLatino, say, in your 20’s, and you are aware enough to know there are more important things in life than social networking, music, dancing, drinking, friends, entertainment and games.  Let’s say that you pick up on the fact that 57 percent of white non-HispanicLatinos have anti-HispanicLatino sentiments, that is, that so-called Anglos think negatively about you, your family and your friends.  The findings from a recent survey commissioned by the Associated Press and conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and Stanford and Michigan universities are no surprise to most HispanicLatinos.  But what is someone so young supposed to think – or do?  The answer is to make it about you yourself, not them.  What 57 percent of Anglos think is less important as each day passes and will have lesser and lesser bearing.

Most writers across the country have bemoaned the results of the study.  It is, I suppose, sad – if you live in the past.  A different viewpoint should take hold instead of morose musings that the country never achieved harmonic convergence on race.  It does not matter now that the country never got to some nebulous promised land where skin color and ethnicity blended into some sort of multicultural muddle.  The very point of where humankind finds itself today is that in a globalized world, all cultures matter, and, in fact, matter equally.  The point of the future is that we are going to have to get along despite lasting natural differences not melt each other into some vapid subsistence.

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America: A Community in Jeopardy

In Monday’s perhaps decisive presidential debate on foreign policy, its participants mentioned the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Had Richard M. Nixon been elected in 1960 instead of John F. Kennedy the world almost certainly could have come to an end two years later.  Nixon was an insecure, neurotic man who would have sided immediately with the Joint Chiefs of Staff who – to a man – wanted to bomb Cuba the sooner the better.  The Russian reaction against American bombers would have triggered a nuclear catastrophe.  Kennedy was the stronger man.  He withstood the pressure of the less visionary around him, and he risked the judgment of an American people freaked out over communists lurking in every closet.

It does matter who gets elected, and in recent years across this country at many levels of government the wrong men and women have been elected for as equally a potentially conclusive moment in American history – when the very concept of community is at stake.  And the problem might be compounded in less than two weeks when the country votes for President.  Regular readers of this blog know that its central tenet is the impact and potential of the country’s new demography.  And the new demography is on par with any experience the country has faced.  It is not as compelling as missiles off the coast of Florida.  Rather, it is a slow-motion event not given to searing images or dramatic news footage, and it is happening against a backdrop of publicly-elected individuals who are fearful of the demographic change the country is undergoing and who certainly are no longer willing – as generations past did – to help pay for the success of the community of the future.

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To Frack or not to Frack

President Obama in the debate on Tuesday made a passing reference to the role that natural gas can play in the nation’s economic future.  The need in a probable second term to accelerate the development of the country’s immense natural gas resources to power a new century of American power and prosperity is achingly evident.  It is incumbent on the Administration to press forward.  During the British Petroleum oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, there did not seem to be anyone in the inner circles of the Administration with an oil and gas background to provide timely and effective counsel in the worst of happenstances.  And it showed.  So there is reason now to make sure that what could be the best is not mishandled.  The country, after all, stands at the threshold of an astonishing economic renaissance.  An effort on the scale of John Kennedy summoning the nation to win the race to the moon against the Soviets will be necessary, for the mission has many environmental and other hurdles to surmount.

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