HispanicVista Columnists
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The
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By
Sal Osio, JD - From the Publisher's Corner
- Mi Punto de Vista
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The
- By Sal
Osio, JD
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Our support for
democracy.
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Political corruption.
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Discrimination.
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Due process.
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Imperialism.
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Justice.
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Separation of Church and
State.
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Immigration.
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Education.
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Financial Integrity.
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- Sal Osio is the Publisher of HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com). Contact at SPosio@aol.com
The only way we can preserve our nation and honor our Preamble and Constitution is to recognize our faults, make atonement and seek redemption as a nation. And, we can only accomplish this by taking the lead as citizens, taking our government back from the corrupt and self serving politicians; and, by instituting critically needed reforms. These reforms require our formulating solutions to the above mentioned contradictions.
The following are some of the principal contradictions which we must address and for which we must seek contrition and atonement if we are to find redemption as a society:
We hold ourselves as the beacon of democracy for all of mankind to follow. And yet we don’t lead by example. In fact, we have supported every dictatorship in existence: Vargas in Brazil; Batista in Cuba; the Shah in Iran; Somoza in Nicaragua; Trujillo in the Dominican Republic; Jimenez in Venezuela; Pinochet in Chile; Marcos in the Philippines; all the Kingdoms in the Middle East; ad nausea. We should tone down our braggadocio and lead by example. Our national interest should be social justice for our planet as opposed to our dominion and control for self gain, to benefit American multi national behemoths.
We hold ourselves to be the least corrupt government in the world. But that is only because we legalized corruption by authorizing lobbyists and authorizing their influence over our politicians through political contributions to their campaigns for election. Our country is run by special interests that have corrupted our politicians whose mantra is the acquisition and the retention of power.
We are the country who nationalized the institution of slavery and maligned the dignity of man, committing the most abdominal crimes against humanity. And after abolishing the institution of slavery we perpetuated apartheid for over a century. We are a society who prides itself as being Christian and yet corrupts Christ’s teachings of love and respect for one’s fellowman. In many of our communities we are still a pigmentocracy wherein we value a man’s worth by the color of his skin – a white supremacist mindset.
We hold ourselves as a nation governed by the rule
of law – due process – based on Constitutional guarantees. And yet,
without provocation or justification we arrested and confiscated the
private property of our citizens and incarcerated 300,000 residents in
our West Coast during WW II only because they were of Japanese ancestry.
In the ‘War Against Drugs,’ without due process, we have confiscated
private property in the billions of dollars and unjustly arrested and
convicted thousands of our countrymen. In
Imperialism, the subjugation of other nations and
the acquisition of foreign owned territories by force, is an American
tradition. We are a pugnacious nation. It started with the take over of
the Native American land, leaving in our wake some ten million
casualties; our unprovoked invasion and appropriation of one half of
In
Our Republic’s principal architect was Thomas Jefferson. Two of his greatest and lasting achievements were the separation of church and state – freedom of worship – and affordable education for the masses. Today, ‘born again Christians,’ represent one-third of the country’s religious affiliation. Evangelism is greater than conventional Protestantism and Catholicism and has trespassed into government affairs. Politicians are supported for high office, such as for the nomination of Rick Perry as the GOP standard bearer for the presidency, through a network of religious centers and the endorsement in public forums and in the media by the Evangelical clergy.
My previous commentary, “Freedom from Religion” discusses this dynamic in more detail, including the false and unwarranted attack on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Christian religion, whose member, Mitt Romney, is the leading GOP candidate. Exclusionary dogma, discriminatory of non-Christian faiths, such as Islam, and the political agenda to legalize morals, such as the prohibition of same sex unions, if unchecked, will reinstate the influence and dominion of church over state. But more, the anti Muslim spiteful and incendiary rhetoric will place our country on a collision course against Islam leading to a global war that could end civilization.
During our recent economic boom years of prosperity, our nation needed affordable workers in our labor intensive industries, such as agriculture, construction and the service sectors, in order to finance and sustain our growth. Through NAFTA which provided access to the Mexican market for our agricultural products, notably our grains which with our technology we can mass produce at a lesser cost than anywhere else in the world, such as wheat and corn, we displaced millions of Mexican farmers. They in turn found work in our labor intensive industries; albeit in the absence of proper immigration documentation. Over the years we harbored some twelve million economic exiles - illegal immigrants - including their family members.
Now that we don’t need them since we are in the
depths of the great recession and suffering from high unemployment, we
want to boot them out, including the innocent children born as Americans
in this country. To that end several states, notably
To sustain a democracy it is essential to have an educated electorate capable of making informed decisions. The ambivalence of the majority of our electorate, sarcastically referred to as ‘the Wal-Mart society’ due to the sampling of ignorant shoppers, is due to a lack of education. Ignorance leads to a fear of the unknown exploited by government officials to gain and retain power. In the absence of knowledge the people cannot fend for themselves and will continue to be victimized by the oligarchy – the Fortune 500 – and the government which protects big business at the expense of the ordinary people. Knowledge and culture are the byproducts of education. Our society is seriously lagging behind other industrialized nations in the education of its citizenry. Despite our military strength, in the absence of an educated society, we are fundamentally a weak nation; not unlike a brute who lashes out physical violence without cause or justifiable objective.
Our government is caught on a financial quicksand which may sink our treasury and erode our financial integrity, both on the public and private sectors. We continue to borrow beyond our ability to repay our debt. Our government budget continues to exceed our revenue beyond any prudent standards. The primary causes for this conundrum are the excessive cost of national defense and an inequitable taxing system that favors the wealthy at the expense of ninety-nine percent of the American taxpayers. The common sense solution is the drastic reduction of our military budget and the reformation of our tax codes to generate revenue on an equitable basis. Economists maintain that our excessive federal debt, not only is not sustainable, but, worse yet, it is the torpedo below the waterline of our mother ship, the sinking of the American nation.
I have outlined some issues of moral and practical concern to us as a society. Those of us who are privileged with knowledge, culture and education should consider these gifts as a source of power to be held in trust for the benefit of our neighbors who are less privileged. It is our responsibility to lead and to care, to be at the vanguard of reforms. We should not hold accountable our neighbors whose ambivalence is rooted on ignorance. Just the opposite, we must attempt to improve their standing and protect their rights as Americans and as human beings.
We are a society of contrasts and contradictions. We are the people whose forebears founded a nation based on self rule and freedom from tyranny – the greatest political experiment ever undertaken; who settled a land to make a home free from oppression with the creation of wealth based on merit and not birthright; who fought a civil war and incurred one million casualties in order to be rid of slavery; who saved the world from Hitler’s tyranny; who rescued the defeated nations from starvation and reconstituted a more prosperous world in the aftermath of WW II; who led the United Nations in the preservation of South Korea’s independence from the yoke of Communist authoritarianism; and, many more such illustrations of extraordinary benevolence. We have done so many things so well that it becomes unexplainable that we have also committed serious misdeeds against humanity.
In our country we do so many things so well that when we drop the ball our faults are magnified. The officious remark, “I never would have expected it of them,” is the very reaction of world opinion. A significant majority of our countrymen are ambivalent to social-political, national and international issues. The prevailing attitude is, back off, leave me alone, don’t bother me – what I don’t know can’t hurt me. Our better educated and more informed citizens, a minority of the electorate, are critics of our government and join the chorus of world opinion, but for different reasons. Informed and caring Americans disagree with our misdeeds and try to correct them, whereas our overseas critics often delight at our flaws and failures.