People remember specifically where they were the moment they heard John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas in 1963.  Very few of us will remember – since no one knows exactly when it happened – the moment that “white” births in the nation fell below 50 percent, most likely sometime in early 2011.  Yet in comparison, the news that HispanicLatinos, blacks, Asians and those of mixed are giving birth to a new majority is by far more important than what happened in Dallas, although it certainly was not caught on film.

In reading the attendant stories reporting on the Census Bureau announcement, the graphic lines representing white and non-white births cross simply, silently.  But, like the exact moment when a bullet roared through Kennedy’s head, history will record that …history changed, but it was not shattered.  I was a kid in 1963, playing in a schoolyard of a small city in West Texas and after the principal came on the public address system and dismissed us for the day, everyone scurried home.  It was in the next two years that I saw our town start changing.  Upon the mechanization of the cotton fields, Congress then changed the law so that the legal Mexican workers were no longer necessary and had to go elsewhere.  Suddenly, the church on Sundays was not as packed.  Not much later, the local air force base closed, and the population changed again.  But no one knew at the time that by the mid-1970’s  the number of children born of white parents had begun to drop dramatically across the nation – below replacement rates – and has not stopped since and in fact has accelerated so that 2011 will go down in history as the epic year when America changed and became something else – but what?

After Kennedy was killed, pundits like to write, the country changed.  But after 2011 what will the pundits write?  That 2011 meant nothing, or everything?  That it was in the following year in 2012 that America finally got it and rallied itself to understand the relationship between demographic growth, education and economic growth?  Or that it was the year when the Supreme Court at the behest of racist crazies accelerated the choking of the nation’s lifeline by affirming anti-HispanicLatino laws such as Arizona’s and Alabama’s and Georgia’s and Texas’?  Will historians look back and be astonished at a Congress that – locked in partisan warfare fueled by the very angst generated by the new demography – let the nation sink further into fiscal abyss and complicated its future further by not spending more on education?

Will historians write that 2012 was when HispanicLatinos finally understood that they were responsible for the nation’s future – and started to act like it?

Nothing matters in a nation’s life more than demography.  No assassination, no presidential impeachment, no Columbine, no first black President, no Steve Jobs.  And without education all is lost.  At one time, Arab scholars were the intellectual masters of the universe.  What happened?  And there was a time when America was thought to be exceptional but will now China and the rest of the world make of the United States but another England?

Running home from school that November day in Dallas, I was scared as everyone else.  Today is scarier – by far.

Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.