The spectacle of fundamentalist preachers extending their hands blessing Rick Santorum’s candidacy at a religious convocation in McKinney, Texas, several weeks ago was jarring. The image stays with the mind, especially as the controversy over birth control – can that be right, a controversy in the year 2012 over birth control? – continues to roil the race for the Republican nomination for president and leaves Andrea Mitchell breathless.
Tag Archives: HispanicLatinos
Without Solutions, Things Could Get More Complicated Still
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.
A Challenge for HispanicLatinos: To Wholly Understand Themselves
How America proceeds into the future with a growing but economically disadvantaged HispanicLatino population is hardly a question on the national agenda. In almost defaulting on its financial obligations last year, the United States demonstrated in real time that after 40 years of economic change, precious few Americans understand how the country got to this point and fewer have a clue about the way forward. Having barely devoted time to understand the larger economic and demographic story transforming the country, the vast majority of Americans could not possibly understand the criticality of raising the country’s debt ceiling.
HispanicLatinos are no different. Beyond knowing the general framework of the problems and challenges facing the country, few have any idea about what they should do next. Even though many more HispanicLatinos are sensing how critical they are to the nation’s future, the true scope of their importance does not animate their daily lives.
HispanicLatinos: A Different Deal at an Important Moment for the Country
Through the years most Americans have believed that their country is exceptional and assume it is eternal. Indeed, its ability to provide opportunity and freedom and to convert human potential into spectacular scientific and technological progress eclipses other nations, and America remains a shining example of the promise of humankind. Despite its faults and shortcomings and because it is not a perfect union, it could have become a slave-holding, colonial-imperialist power for longer than it was tempted. Enough of its people, however, chose differently.
Americans have spent hundreds of thousands of lives and invested trillions of dollars to make the world a safe and better place for humankind. Most Americans – including the vast majority of HispanicLatinos for whom loyalty is almost part of their DNA – take immense pride in their country, and rightfully so. Yet history is not destiny; demography is.
To Be or Not to Be: A Nation in Decline with HispanicLatinos at Its Center
The United States is in decline and in danger and, like nations throughout history, can fail. Unless HispanicLatinos – continuously becoming a larger part of the national population – understand the circumstances confronting them and the country, they will jeopardize their own existence and further complicate the viability of America’s future.
You Can Take It With You
It is hard right now to quantify the impact that immigrants leaving the country are having on the national economy. Soon enough, though, a think tank will put pencil to paper and we should have a better idea. But it stands to reason that those of us who through the years have seen cities revitalized from one coast to the other will not be surprised at the data that will show a downtick in economic activity and increased joblessness across the board. Indeed, entire towns and industries in the Midwest and in the South are being saved from extinction by immigrants who do work no one else wants.
We seem to forget so quickly that a growing population drives an economy forward. It is a simple lesson. The term ‘ghost town’ might invoke scenes from old western movies but it also is an economic epitaph: No people, no economy. No economy, no city.
The Smallness of Not Knowing
It if was not enough to have to listen to Michael Wilbon gratuitously ping soccer for no good reason on ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption – which I watch religiously – now comes CNN’s Rowland Martin not only to demean the world’s most popular sport but to advocate violence against gays. Wilbon is quite sane on the gay matter but civil rights pressure groups are after Martin’s head.
On the Catholic Vote
A headline in a news story the other day asked ‘Is Obama losing the Catholic vote?’ The story sought to answer a question that might interest political strategists more so than the American public. It is a curious thing, the relationship that Americans have to government and to religion. Depending on the political environment, Americans rush to any and all sides of any debate involving both.
Drugged and Ignorant
I have stopped paying attention to most people who think they know what they are talking about when it comes to the situation in Mexico and Latin America regarding the drug threat. In almost all the public pronouncements of know-it-alls from presidential candidates to the lowliest of citizens, they seemingly all profess to know how to best handle the border against drug smuggling. Fences. Lampposts. Sensors. Armed guards. Pilotless drones. Moats. Walls.
Morons. Few ever consider that the fault lies on this side of the border.
Texas Means More to the Nation Than to Texans
Though I like to believe I think broadly and that I have strived to shed provincialisms, I am a Texan by birth, and I am heart-broken at the beating my home state is taking and has taken since George W. Bush became President under suspect circumstances in 2000.
It is hard for people, perhaps, to understand what Texas means to Texans. But more so than in sheer nativist or parochial loyalty, my sentiment for the state is rooted in the view that it is essential to the future of the country. So my feelings are more than resentments about how the national press is making a joke out of Texas through the lens of the national political stage. If Texas fails as a state – which it might well do if its growing HispanicLatino population does not accelerate its economic and social standing – the country will fail. Think California, which remains on the ropes and whose educational system – meaning its future – has cracked. California schools no longer are the foundation from which the state blasted into the future and took the world – not just the country – with it. Continue reading