Category Archives: Culture

Needed: A New People with a New Plan — Now

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Regarding their common – and to many, worrisome – future, neither the country nor HispanicLatinos have a plan.  The much ballyhooed “bridge to the 21st Century” that Bill Clinton talked about in his re-election campaign is no more than a plank walk at the moment.

America – until now – never needed a plan.  In its earliest years, the nation fought great political battles over a national banking system and government involvement in the development of a young country’s infrastructure that included canals, national roads and bridges.  Once settled, these initial disputes opened up a continent to the economic energy thrown off by the Industrial Revolution that ultimately hurled America into the forefront of nations in the 20th century.

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HispanicLatinos: Critical, Strategic Asset Not Yet in Gear

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Were population groups merely fungible, the current challenges facing America and HispanicLatinos might be less compelling.  If HispanicLatino households reflected the socioeconomic characteristics of the Anglo household, their growing numbers would be what the nation needs to help balance its budget and invest in its future.  But though HispanicLatinos constitute an important strategic asset in the fiscal future of the country, they are in dire straits.  HispanicLatinos earn little more than as 40 years ago.  In a land that aspires to political and societal equality, the economic inequality among its individual components has taken on ominous implications.

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Attacks on Women and HispanicLatinos: One and the Same

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I would imagine that women outraged by Rush Limbaugh’s comments denigrating the Georgetown student might now see why HispanicLatinos rejoiced yesterday when the Department of Justice ruled against the state of Texas’ voter identification laws targeting minority voters.  Limbaugh’s people and the Republican majority of the Texas Legislature that enacted the punitive laws requiring photo identification are one and the same.  In fact, they are one and the same throughout the country, including states like Wisconsin, whose law was also struck down this week.

These are the same GOP legislative majorities that are requiring sonograms and that have embarked on a jihad against contraceptive tools using President Obama’s health care as their stalking horse.  As in other states, women who are under attack deserve and require defense.  So it is with HispanicLatinos and other minorities whom Republicans would want to take back to the dark ages.

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A post-racial society? In our lifetimes? LOL

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I have to strain to refrain from laughing when I hear someone say or write that we live in a post-racial society.  No doubt, the country’s non-Anglo population has reached a critical mass.  But it has not reached critical acceptance of the HispanicLatinos, blacks, Asians and the many others who are transforming the nation – and most likely never will.  Last week, in San Antonio, the kids from Edison High School, an overwhelmingly HispanicLatino campus, were subjected to shouts of “USA! USA!” after their basketball team lost a playoff game to a school from across town in predominantly non-HispanicLatino Alamo Heights.

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HispanicLatinos and the Need to Rethink Themselves

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Without HispanicLatinos, America would be hollowed out demographically at a time when the country is fundamental to the security of the world – an essential truth that HispanicLatinos must inculcate in the marrow of their bones. HispanicLatinos must now think of themselves in a profoundly historic way.  They must view themselves for the strategic assets that they have become and think about how they accelerate the development of their inner potential and innate talents. They are essential to the future of the country in the most basic of ways: They have become a national security concern.

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The New America: A New Creation

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To an already over-populated world undoubtedly harming its environment and contributing to climate change, the thought of adding more people to a global population of seven billion is not a subject easily dismissed nor left blithely unconsidered.  Yet, the arms race of the previous century has been displaced by an undeclared demographic war among nations, and America cannot but continue to grow its own population.

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The Nation-saving Purpose of the HispanicLatino Population

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Readers who have heard me speak know that it was as a teenager more than 40 years ago that I watched the impact that sudden changes in demography and in the economy can unleash.  The winding down of the bracero program and the nearly simultaneous closing of the local air force base devastated the town in West Texas where my family once lived.  From that experience it was only a matter of time before I realized what was coming to the country as a whole.  As a young reporter in Corpus Christi in the late 1970’s, I saw the makeup of its schools’ HispanicLatino population prefigure the slow unfolding of the drama we are witnessing today.  It was then that I first learned the power of 2.1.

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Anti-HispanicLatino Rhetoric – a Small Silver Lining

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So it is true that anti-HispanicLatino rhetoric continues unchecked, driven by the prolonged Republican presidential primary campaign, fed by the fights in places like Alabama, Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina over mostly unconstitutional state laws on immigration and festooned by the antics of the hate-filled Joe Arpaio.  And the tone of the attacks that like shrapnel explode in every part of the HispanicLatino community might get shriller still.  However, a sliver lining adorns every cloud.

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National Decline: A Burden for HispanicLatinos

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The phrase national decline finally has entered the lexicon of American political thought – and not soon enough.  How much time America has to address its national decline is an interesting question given that the nation’s government has entered a period of stagnation and ideological paralysis.  The institutions of government, paralyzed by the nation’s increasingly polarized and monetized politics, show no signs of being able to put forth strategies to sustain the nation’s future.

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Culture Change

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At the core of the way forward for HispanicLatinos and the country is implementing change.  Change is the universal, common condition of humankind, flowing from its evolutionary nature, and most change throughout history has been for the good.  Yet, for a nation that knows it faces tremendous challenges, the forces of inevitable change cannot be left to chance and to the vagaries of the trillions upon trillions of decisions that individuals make on a daily basis that in the end result in the society that surrounds us.

To the potentially decisive moment in history to which HispanicLatinos are called – which is nothing less than sustaining an America that can continue to influence events on a widening global stage – how to change what is must be a constant component of our thinking.

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