The day was long, its shadows stretching their elongated forms across the road. To the left of me at a car mall along the interstate, a super-sized American flag too heavy to fly full was at half-mast, its drooping symbolic of a nation weighed down by grief and bewilderment about what to do next about the blood-madness unleashed by guns in our society. I wondered if the political system could bear the responsibility of steering the nation around and through what has become a moment of turning, when we as a people are presented with the opportunity to grow. This, after all, is not like the attacks of September 11, 2001. Those attacks were of an enemy foreign to our land; there was no reason to doubt anything. Connecticut was an attack from within. The question now is whether we can react against those who attack us every day and then attack us all at once on a campus of innocents.
Author Archives: jesse
Huckabee as Huckabeen
When Republicans ponder if they are going the way of the Whigs, they do not have to go much further than listen to Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who aspires to be President. Huckabee said after the tragedy in Connecticut last week that because prayer, according to him, is banned from public schools: Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? Huckabee’s God evidently tolerates a misanthropic young man pumping hot bullets into 20 kids and six adults because the Constitution allegedly prohibits prayer in schools. Actually, prayer happens in schools every day.
Had Huckabee been elected President in 2008 – he was the frontrunner at one point – and re-elected in 2012, he would have stood at the podium at the White House from where President Obama spoke to a stunned nation on Friday. But would comfort from a President Huckabee have settled upon the shell-shocked, distraught families of the victims or would blame have rained on them for not forcing the local school board to force the kids of Newtown into prayers clubs?
I cannot even begin to fathom what would have driven Adam Lanza to commit the incomprehensible. And neither can I understand the likes of Huckabee whose view of God is so vengeful and small. All of us have sinned, but I doubt God punishes people who do not pray to Him/Her on a daily basis. Huckabee imagines a God who punishes youngsters for the presumed constitutional transgressions of their parents. Huckabee cheapens God. He cheapens children who had not yet reached the age of reason. For some, Santa Claus had more immediate meaning; and most of them could not even have known what prayer is.
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.
On Gay Marriage, HispanicLatinos Move Beyond Their History
The Supreme Court’s decision to rule on gay marriage after sidestepping the issue for so long constitutes another pivotal moment in the development of the new Hispanic/Latino social and political identity. Like every group that evolves into the consciousness of being an American, HispanicLatinos become in various forms the products of efforts to attain the American ideal — which changes over time. The American of today is not the American of the 1960’s and certainly not the American of a half century later. Neither are HispanicLatinos.
How exactly HispanicLations evolve — bombarded as they have been by the sweeping forces that have transformed society during five decades of halycon change — is not yet fully evident. In many ways Hispanics or/and Latinos are still discovering themselves. Many are sinewously insecure. A population that goes by two different names cannot be anything but a collection of individuals still figuring things out — advancing the idea that HispanicLatinos are not like everyone else. Indeed, they are not alike in many ways to each other. But regarding gay marriage, it would appear that HispanicLatinos in toto have moved past their former thinking — and, thus, their former selves.
The more interesting question is why HispanicLatinos are not following the script they were once expected to read from and, more so, how does one address them in the third millennium of modern time and the third century of the American Republic?
Dying Inside the Border Should Be Enough
The recent fire in a factory in Bangladesh that claimed the lives of114 garment workers generated international headlines and calls for reform of working conditions in similar plants in Asia. Yet the ongoing human tragedy along the border with Mexico somehow escapes notice. Scores of mostly Mexican immigrants are dying trying to get across along the frontier. More than 120 bodies of human beings once treking through Brooks County alone in South Texas have been found this year. They died of exposure to harsh conditions, rattlesnakes, dehydration and foul play. The number of victims more likely reaches 500. Authorities estimate that only one in four victims is ever found. The chances of surviving are low.
This ghastly, sad human toll is only one of the imperatives that should be driving discussions about immigration in Washington. At the moment, though, there does not seem to be a draft plan being discussed uniformly by all interested parties. If a breakthrough is not soon achieved, it will be a long time before today’s propitious, post-election opportunity comes again. And, if the latest jobs report from the Department of Labor released last week indicates an economy turning around, then it will become again the magnet dulled by the Bush recession and by the slow recovery afterward. Would now not be the right time to put a system in place so that future immigrant waves are not chaotic repeats of the acrimony and suffering of the past three decades?
It is about voting and so much more
Posted on Dec . 6 for Dec. 7
News reports in the weeks leading up to the election in November about obstacles being placed to obstruct HispanicLatinos and other minorities from voting terrified a friend of mine in New York. I assured him that the Obama people were on top of the situation. Of course, the Obama team had a lot of it covered, filing lawsuits left and right. More important, though, minority voters reacted and voted in greater numbers than in 2008. Does that mean that efforts to intimidate minority voters will stop? Of course not. The Obama campaign is not going to prosecute the issue, and the individuals who ramrodded these unnecessary, nonsensical laws, aided and abetted by simplistic slogans about drivers’ licenses and boarding airplanes, are motivated not by civic sensitives as they are by racial and ethnic animosities. And that is a lasting feature of life in America today.
That kind of accusatory statement seems to be as pejorative as the unkind statements Tea party types make about minorities. But the anti-voter laws became an avalanche as a reaction to Barack Obama’s win in 2008. Previous superficial social conventions were the products of a belief that the country would never elect a black man President in the first place. So, after his victiry, disappointment gave rise to strategies intended to prevent his re-election by taking aim at all minotities. The motivation of the voter-intimidators was made evident by the fact that these anti-discriminatory laws were enacted not just in swing states but in states that Obama had no chance of carrying. So voter intimidation laws also are aimed at HispanicLatinos who live in swing states and in states that in due time will feel their states pulled into a new political orbit. HispanicLatinos have to be on guard. Maximizing their political power is critical for their social and economic advancement.
But beyond keeping these tactical imperatives in mind and keeping Republicans’ — especially HispanicLatino Republicans’ — feet to the fire, what are the larger issues that HispanicLatinos should dog?
The Enemy Within
It is hard to see how and why the leadership of the Republican party does not see the danger at hand for its future. Its leaders are not aware that their party could be only a few years from extinction. Things do die. Larger entities than the Republican party – whole empires and powerful corporations, in fact – have disappeared through history. A political party disappearing is nothing. On this business of the fiscal cliff, the country already is suspicious of Republicans by a 2-1 margin. So within a few weeks, the country could blame Republicans for throwing the economy back into recession. And let us say that another storm like Sandy brews up in the Atlantic next summer, pushes past Florida and instead of wrecking New York and New Jersey parks itself over Atlanta this time. Already caught in a demographic squeeze as the nation’s population changes, embroiled in an extended Bush recession and then pasted by another blow from the change in climate that Republicans deny – the GOP could be at the precipice leading into the 2014 midterm elections. They just lost an election that if President Obama had had a better night in Denver one evening might have turned into a landslide. And now, another storm named Hillary already is beginning to vent its first soft but undeniable breezes for 2016.
Building New Rhetoric Not New Walls
Two standard phrases crop up the instant that lawmakers, bureaucrats and the media begin to talk about immigration: Resolve the problem and comprehensive immigration reform. Talk in Washington about resolving any large-scale challenge is rather ambitious given the city’s ever-steepening warps in its already pockmarked ideological-rhetorical terrain. Immigration is not an easy subject to talk about dispassionately, and so how Washington gains traction on immigration no doubt will be affected greatly by how lawmakers and the President manage the fast-approaching fiscal cliff.
The 2012 election, it is said, opened Republicans to accept the possibility that they might have to compromise on immigration, something that most of those commonly referred to as the Tea party adamantly oppose. The corporate side of the Republican equation, however, is in favor of something being done, and corporate America has more of the power now. It is not surprising that it also is driving a good part of the discussion of how to avert the cliff.
Lincoln and the Questions of Our Lives
Are we fitted into the times we are born into? So asks Abraham Lincoln in the new film that should be required viewing for all – more so for modern-day Republicans than anyone else. The Lincoln in Lincoln is the dream of any Democrat or Republican. A nation so divided as ours is today, riven by intense ideological rivalries and regional, sectional differences, could use an individual who commands the respect of all to ask the eternal question we ask of ourselves with often vague success, How and where do we fit? Lincoln did not ask the more important question that has dogged humankind since it attained the power to reason, What does it all mean? No, he asked the one that we should be able to answer, for we do have the power to control our lives. Incumbent in Lincoln’s question is the degree to which each citizen and resident of the United States understands his or her responsibilities.
Two Parties: Two HispanicLatino Vice Presidents
The attention that the HispanicLatino vote received during the presidential campaign and future demographic projections of its growth have caused the media and obsessive politico-types to speculate about when the first President of HispanicLatino descent will be sworn into office. The strategic placement of the HispanicLatino population in critical states has made a deep impression on political strategists that appears lasting and could accelerate the election to the Presidency a member of a group that only this year surpassed 10 percent of the national voting electorate. It seems absurd that people on television are fantasizing about future administrations, but the emergence of the telegenic Castro twins of San Antonio on the national scene had fueled the chatter.