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.