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Boricua Futuristics…. Part 1

3 Jul

Hello all,

I have didn’t write new posts for my blog for some time. I haven’t gotten back to flowers in a while due to the exigencies of my work life. HOWEVER, I feel compelled to put out some thinking on what I am calling Boricua Futuristics or how to think about the future of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. I am compelled because of the dire situation that Puerto Rico is in.

In a “Back to the Future” kind of way, I reflect upon this, thinking of some young man and some woman who, because of economic hardship, are or are planning to leave Borinquen. They may come to meet here in the USA and they may have children. Those children may come to have children. Amongst those children of children, there may be a boy who grows up and dreams.

I am speaking as that boy. A person that is the child of a child of a migrant. My abuelos came to this country 91 years ago because of an economic crisis in those days. An economic crisis that happened 26 years after the invasion of Puerto Rico by the United States in 1898 and 8 years after the USA legislated that all Puerto Ricans were US citizens. A child that was born in the year 1898 and a citizen in 1917 could have been the parent of my grand parents and probably were. There was very few opportunities for them in those days because of a vast economic transformation grinding poverty was rampant and they came to NYC to make a better life. Their child was born about 17 years before another upheaval caused the big wave of Boricuas to come to NYC and other destinations.

91 years later I am observing a similar situation. A vast economic transformation is causing migration. People are leaving in droves. The economics calls upon us to contemplate the politics and sociology and indeed the future. This is what I’m going to do.

One future I can imagine is a Puerto Rican dystopia where the island is depopulated and non-Puerto Ricans become the majority. You might see it as transnational gentrification, the whites move in to the neighborhood the original residents can’t afford anymore.

This would be the beginning of the end of Puerto Ricans…with no cultural anchor…the culture will disintegrate and pass into the dustbin of history. Kind of a cultural extinction event. Cultures, like species can become extinct.

There are other peoples that have been driven off their land. Just ask Palestinians and Native folks. The continuance of their cultures is a real issue. We are talking about glacially slow, but inexorable processes.

This is all happening in the era of the meteoric rise of the 1%…the “Masters of the Universe” that are in control of many more planetary resources than ever before. The city, state and national bankruptcies are just the footprints of the behemoths striding across the globe. The various cities in the USA (in Detroit and other small municipalities, Stockton CA) States such as Illinois and nations such as Puerto Rico and Greece. We have to think, not just about how we got here, but where are we going.

I’m going to try to do a little bit of that.

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Part 1: my series … My AI overlord

4 Jul

OK, for the first part of this series, I would have to ask my friends….

Do you think evolution is a fact of nature?

Do you think humans evolved?

Do you think humans are evolving?

Do you think that evolution is natural?

IF your answer to all these questions is yes, then it should surprise you that the humans of the future will not be the same as the humans of today. To incorrectly anthropomorphize, one might even say that this is what nature intended.

Just as we supplanted the Neanderthals, Denosovians, Hobbits and the mysterious others, so shall some further evolved homo species supplant us. Thus is the order of things.

Anybody have a problem with this?

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Thinking about Progressive icons in the Puerto Rican Community

15 Feb

I write the following as a Boricua who is interested in the betterment of my community.  This betterment is achieved in my view throughout the application of a progressive perspective.  When I say betterment, I mean the health of the community in all or as many dimensions as possible.  I am talking about the community’s thriving and its self-knowledge.

By progressivism I mean humanism, skepticism and enlightenment values. Humanism in the sense of the fulfillment of the potential of our community’s people, a skepticism based on the a distrust of common views within and without our community in terms of our basic humanity, our basic competence, our ability to guide our destinies.  This skepticism holds in radical doubt any view that diminishes the potential and practice of our community and its people.

Enlightenment values are many but some include that we are human beings and hence endowed with rights by our mere existence.

I think progressivism embodies these principles and draws its power to motivate from many sources…the power to motivate or inspiration is an essential component in counteracting oppression.  To endow with a spirit or a mood or motivation.    In this vein, I would venture some thoughts about progressivism in the Puerto Rican community.

First, all peoples draw upon people and events of the past to serve as avatars of what is possible in the present.  Conservatives draw upon the past to justify their power and privilege.  Progressives adopt the same strategy, but more to open possibilities of different ways of organizing society and to highlight those that tried to move towards better possibilities.  Like most progressives,  I want our community to draw upon their past as sign posts of our full humanity and elixirs of hope and creativity.

However, the accident of birth allows me a unique perspective,  I was born in a time that in some ways was between generations.  Both generations strove to change society, both had successes and failures, but each generation approached the project of changing society differently.  One was the pre WWII generation and the other was the post WWII generation…. the old and new left as it is often described.

 

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