HispanicLatinos are more important to America than simply holding up a national population that otherwise would be in serious decline. Yet they are a complicated blessing, given their complicated history. Significant-enough discrimination, legally-mandated exclusion, ample geographic isolation and individual self-neglect in many HispanicLatinos sheltered their culture from full-fledged assimilation in American society.
Thus hindered and restrained, HispanicLatinos began to fall behind early and have lagged through the years. But change can happen quicker today than in any time in history. HispanicLatinos now can develop a new way to manage their immediate future, and they can look to the just-immediate past to see how the prospects of a whole country can change in the span of only a few years.
When the United States entered the new millennium as the colossus of the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union, American power seemed limitless. With enormous economic advantages feeding and nurturing its presumably insurmountable technological and military prowess, America appeared ready to dominate the 21st century as it had towered over the last half of the 20th.
From these commanding heights, America seemed omnipotent. America’s elevation to near-omnipotent status caused some to conclude that the country was exceptional. But the spectacular fall of communism signaled only that the world was about to experience mind-bending change. An orgasmic sense of power fueled the costly disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tax break after tax break, lack of effective financial regulation in the market place and the mismanagement of the government’s finances helped almost cripple the country. Excessive pride and plunder plunged the country into its current distress with breath-taking rapidity.
After a financial crisis accompanied by the most serous economic recession since the Great Depression, the structural changes in its economy that the country was long warned about through the years have taken hold. Despite its still-significant size, the American economy has no immediately obvious way to generate new employment opportunities to replace millions of lost jobs and to respond effectively to the new global order in which other nations have emerged as economic powerhouses.
The economy remains under constant, growing stress from global changes in production that during the last four decades devastated the American manufacturing base. As more countries continue to put millions of workers to productive use, they employ lower labor costs to undercut American products and services at every turn, leaving factories and assembly lines empty – with no end in sight to the erosion of the American economic base.
The resulting transformation of America reduced America’s prospects for the future, weakening the nation at the absolutely wrong moment, when it needs to invest heavily in its people, its infrastructure, its schools and its very creativity – when it should understand the potential of its all-important HispanicLatino population. Instead of being eternally exceptional, the country faces a series of challenges that amounts to as dangerous a time as any since before the civil war engulfed it almost 150 years ago.
Understanding how vast is the potential for change is an opportunity for HispanicLatinos to take time to flesh out and understand the new role that history is calling on them to play and how they can use new media and new channels of communication to develop a new way forward that includes delivering the major ingredient for progress: Education.
No HispanicLatino with effective leadership abilities ever has arisen to give voice to a vision that balances the Spanish and English cultures to maximize the creativity and productivity that could be drawn from each over time. Each HispanicLatino now has a chance to put forth ideas and thoughts that could help turn the country around perhaps as fast as it has declined in but a few years.
Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.