A point of View © 1996
By Paul V. Montesino, PhD., MBA
Every year, about this time, I’ve already accumulated various calendars sent by those who received my donations or expect to receive them in the New Year. If I received as much in donations as those outfits want from me, my income would break my budget.
Calendars are about what comes after, not about what came before. We are supposed to look into those blank future dates with optimism and hope. The first day of the new calendar is tabula rasa, new beginnings, expectation, nothing.
But looking at the colorful pile now forming in one of my cabinets made me wonder whether we are receiving the right calendars. Perhaps these are not the ones we should welcome with open arms. To be honest, it’s not about the future dates that should make us hopeful, but the accomplishments of old dates that should make us celebrate and share our humanity.
What I am looking for is a calendar that reflects our nature to move around this planet we call home, and home it really is, for all of us, not just some of us. The more I hear conversations that describe who we are and, particularly, who we were, the more I realize how blind we are about our history, our old calendars. We seem surprised, many times actually offended, when we notice masses of people we don’t know moving from one place of the world to another as though such activity is something new, mostly illegal, perhaps immoral. How do they dare? What is worse, our constant politicizing of that human behavior says more about our ignorance than about the daring attitude of the movers.
The human race has always been biologically a moving race. We have never stopped moving from one place to another, hoping it would be better. Let’s use the American continent as an example. One day, around the year 1620, one hundred two seafarers arrived suddenly at what is today Plymouth, Massachusetts. But this destination had not been their first or their favorite. Concerned about religious persecution in Europe, they had moved to the Netherlands before finally raising sail.
The newly arrived surprised the Native Americans who received them. Not that the Native Americans had fallen from the trees to become native either. They had arrived many years before from the Siberian-Alaskan northwestern continental connection, finding mastodons and bison roaming around their new land but, of course, nobody was waiting for them at the borders. Things were not that formal. There were no customs. The fact that eventually the Europeans who had moved to America kept arriving and pushing those Native Americans west away from their long-held eastern habitat, says a lot about who and how they were, not about our moving nature.
The humans populating the world today are descendants of a same man who lived in East Africa approximately seventy thousand years ago and decided to start moving east first, north and west later. We carry the evidence in our DNA. They did not have to fill immigration papers or explain the reasons for their movement. They were experts at leaving and showing up.
Years later the Roman, British and Spanish empires to mention only a few, were themselves good moving examples. It is interesting to see today all the arguments about speaking the right language at work. When those of us of Hispanic extraction want to be able to speak our Spanish language, all we are really saying is that we want to be able to speak the imperial Spanish language. Yes, the same that imposed itself over the many native races populating the continent during the Spanish Colonization. And not to be crass, those who would offend you because you don’t speak English at work or in school are actually defending an imperial language that held Africans and Asians, like the Hindus, in chains, for centuries.
So next time someone asks you if you moved, ask them from where to where and when, not the why. You may not hear an answer. There is not a proper one. Shall I move to my next subject? After I move, I will let you now. And yes, I will write the date in my new calendar in order to celebrate.
Have a Happy New Year. Wherever you are.
And that is my point of view today.
