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"Quality of life" is subjective. There are plenty of people living very comfortable lives in Old San Juan, Guaynabo, Dorado... in those places quality of life is just as good or better than most places on the mainland.
Quite simply, many of those who would be in a position to benefit from a move to the mainland are simply ill-equipped or not in an economic position to do so. This is a self-imposed hazard at times. By the time these people are young adults and become frustrated with the daily hardships of living in the island they have already squandered the better part of their formative years intellectually rejecting English proficiency and bi-culturalism. They are ironically handicapped by their rejection of an American self-image (the 'yo soy boricua!' complex) in favor of an insular view of themselves. By the time they are serious about moving they struggle linguistically and culturally to adapt to an environment that would have otherwise provided them with a better overall quality of life had they prepared better for it.
The PR elite of course constructed this outcome very carefully for them, by providing them the addiction to a false national identity that binds them to an island that was never intended to provide for them anything of personal or professional value, just an empty carcass of folklore that won't feed your mouth but, like crystal meth, gives you a cheap and teeth-rotting short term high. Meanwhile, the PR elite continues to travel all over the world, taking full advantage of their US citizenship and reminding the world there are in fact more than one class of people. It's a sad scheme for the average puerto rican really.
Then what you see is what is called the rubber-band migratory patterns of the contemporary Puerto Rican. This can be seen very dramatically in the Orlando, FL population. Most of these people have less than a decade in the mainland and will summarily return to the island once they get rejected by a metropolitan social dynamic that cannot even support mainland americans without a very specific set of educational credentials and/or connections. Just like the migration to NYC from yesteryear, these PRicans were culturally handicapped and educationally ill-equipped to assimilate and compete in the mainland. As such they revert back to the self-image antics of the island and many summarily move back with their tails between their legs, perhaps with even more disdain for the mainland than the time when all they knew about it was what they were taught and told by the PR elite and the island educational system that perpetuates their cultural slavery.
So that's in short why most of the folks who could feasibly benefit from the move don't do so. A percentage do make it over the pond, which accounts for the vast majority of brain drain from the island (yours truly included). PR is doomed to be a de facto timeshare colony of the CONUS and I for one won't shed one tear about it. The island had plenty of opportunities to get with the program and simply chose to follow the ill-advice of a few bourgeoisie that wanted nothing more than to retain their Spanish-era management rights over a colony of dispossessed "jÃbaros" with no education and no clue. When I point this out in criticism of the bourgeoisie I get engaged, not by the "españolitos" in the island, but by the average PR that takes my criticism of the vehicles the elite uses to enslave them as a personal front to their identity. Meanwhile, just like the international financier and banking upper echelon in the CONUS, these island elites are laughing their a&* off in their gated beachfront communities watching people like me point out the truth and get barked off by the very people we're trying to enlighten. It's a lost cause. You gotta help yourself at some point. They used to tease me in high school that if I wanted statehood all I had to do was pick one, since there were 50. I did, and I'm the better for it, joke's on them. They remain back home with that slogan and no job, no peace, no quality of life and the future of repeating the same for their children. An island full of college graduates working middle manager best buy jobs and master degree holding govt secretaries. Meh, I'll pass.
"Quality of life" is subjective. There are plenty of people living very comfortable lives in Old San Juan, Guaynabo, Dorado... in those places quality of life is just as good or better than most places on the mainland.
I have to disagree. While college graduates with good jobs can enjoy a comfortable lifestyle by PR standards, the quality of life is definitely not better than that on the mainland. You might have a decent house and plenty of food in the fridge, but the moment that you step outside of your gated community, you are at the mercy of criminals, have to deal with the insane traffic and pollution, and have to work with the government bureaucracy. Not to mention that salaries are subpar in every category.
Don't get me wrong. I love PR. Most of my family lives down there and I like to visit when I can. But it is not the place where I would like to raise my kids.
we visit family fairly often and while traffic is a big reason I wouldn't want to live there (at least I can avoid traffic at home by taking the train to work), I don't feel unsafe as soon as I step outside the door. I'm sure there are places like that in PR but there are places like that in the US.
hindsight2020, so you pointed out the same problem again, and I agree with you 100%. However, again, you propose no solution. Somehow it is difficult for me to comprehend that such an intelligent and passionate person as you apparently are, has no suggestion on how to fix this mess?
Any social problem and addiction can be fixed. For example, someone made all of America quit smoking the very addictive tobacco. People want to live better and want better things for their children. I don't think that people of PR would be opposed to change under the right circumstances and leadership of the right person.
Therefore, my question to you hindsight2020 is how would you go about introducing change in PR, so that question such as the one posed in this thread will no longer have any validity?
You have to overhaul the way Puerto Ricans define themselves in the context of their US citizenship. This is to say, you have to open the island up to the educational and business opportunities the mainland offers. This entails dispossessing the PR ruling class from their ability to define for the average puerto rican what it means to be one. Bi-culturalism has to be pushed forth as a value-adding trait, and not as cultural suicide as it is currently portrayed. Bi-lingualism has to be embraced by the median puerto rican in the same capacity, a value-adding trait, not cultural suicide.
The most logical conclusion for this outcome on a macro level would be statehood, but said outcome is unlikely right off the chute since there is no incentive for the CONUS to entertain it and there is a cultural dead-lock in the island for it. What needs to happen is the administration needs to go after the tentacles of the octopus before going for its head. This means re-incentivizing mainland industries to do business in the island, refocus the budget from the current one trick pony of putting everybody on the govt payroll and more into a CONUS-centric educational system aimed at highlighting the importance of bilingual proficiency and more exchanges with CONUS universities at the college level. The reason puerto ricans don't feel american is quite literally because the majority thinks of the mainland as a far away land that neither understands them nor represents them. These educational gap fills would change that perception and provide access to the median puerto rican to the idea that the CONUS is not just for the PR elite but rather it is accessible to all those who possess the mere DESIRE to change their condition. You get the majority of college graduates from UPR to adopt this bi-cultural mentality and you would be amazed at the social progress the island can achieve in 10 years.
Furthermore, environmentalists in the island need to be squashed. They are pawns of the PR elite. They promote anti-business agendas that keep the average puerto rican poor and uneducated. They accomplish this by vilifying progressive business and offer the preservation of a 'pristine' island preserved in a time capsule as an inherently valuable pursuit. This is nonsense and needs to be reversed. Folklore doesn't feed a civilization, progress does. There needs to be a counter-culture thinking group of young people that rebuke the environmentalist mantra that being pro-American and respecting one's culture is a mutually exclusive affair. The PR elite is of course at the center of this vendetta. They need to be confronted and challenged.
Finally, puerto ricans from the CONUS (second generation and beyond) need to butt out. They keep a nostalgic view of the island that does nothing to help Puerto Rico progress. It's quite selfish really. All they care about is superfluous talk about folkloric food and music, while disingenuously asserting that they "would love to retire in PR". Nonsense. If PR was good enough for them they would have made the jump already. The reality of the matter is that Ricans from the CONUS love the idea of visiting the island and telling their white friends back home that they have more to their cultural identity than a "plain white anglo-saxon" 200 year old vaguely defined cultural context that they accuse said white friends of having. Same goes for African Americans. Wake the heck up. You're not an island native, you are not vested in the idiosyncrasies of that place and therefore you are in no position to assert that cultural homogeneity (your freggin' affection for 'tostones y lechón asaó') is of more importance that the economic and social progress of 4 million people stuck in a self-appointed rejection of their ability to better their condition for a worthless irrelevancy like a beauty pageant or olympic team representation. If American progress was good enough for you it's good enough for them too.
This is how you make it happen. Will it happen? Unlikely. Which is why I left. I have bigger horizons to travel than to watch myself waste away trying to help people who don't want to help themselves.
Quite simply, many of those who would be in a position to benefit from a move to the mainland are simply ill-equipped or not in an economic position to do so. This is a self-imposed hazard at times. By the time these people are young adults and become frustrated with the daily hardships of living in the island they have already squandered the better part of their formative years intellectually rejecting English proficiency and bi-culturalism. They are ironically handicapped by their rejection of an American self-image (the 'yo soy boricua!' complex) in favor of an insular view of themselves. By the time they are serious about moving they struggle linguistically and culturally to adapt to an environment that would have otherwise provided them with a better overall quality of life had they prepared better for it.
The PR elite of course constructed this outcome very carefully for them, by providing them the addiction to a false national identity that binds them to an island that was never intended to provide for them anything of personal or professional value, just an empty carcass of folklore that won't feed your mouth but, like crystal meth, gives you a cheap and teeth-rotting short term high. Meanwhile, the PR elite continues to travel all over the world, taking full advantage of their US citizenship and reminding the world there are in fact more than one class of people. It's a sad scheme for the average puerto rican really.
Then what you see is what is called the rubber-band migratory patterns of the contemporary Puerto Rican. This can be seen very dramatically in the Orlando, FL population. Most of these people have less than a decade in the mainland and will summarily return to the island once they get rejected by a metropolitan social dynamic that cannot even support mainland americans without a very specific set of educational credentials and/or connections. Just like the migration to NYC from yesteryear, these PRicans were culturally handicapped and educationally ill-equipped to assimilate and compete in the mainland. As such they revert back to the self-image antics of the island and many summarily move back with their tails between their legs, perhaps with even more disdain for the mainland than the time when all they knew about it was what they were taught and told by the PR elite and the island educational system that perpetuates their cultural slavery.
So that's in short why most of the folks who could feasibly benefit from the move don't do so. A percentage do make it over the pond, which accounts for the vast majority of brain drain from the island (yours truly included). PR is doomed to be a de facto timeshare colony of the CONUS and I for one won't shed one tear about it. The island had plenty of opportunities to get with the program and simply chose to follow the ill-advice of a few bourgeoisie that wanted nothing more than to retain their Spanish-era management rights over a colony of dispossessed "jÃbaros" with no education and no clue. When I point this out in criticism of the bourgeoisie I get engaged, not by the "españolitos" in the island, but by the average PR that takes my criticism of the vehicles the elite uses to enslave them as a personal front to their identity. Meanwhile, just like the international financier and banking upper echelon in the CONUS, these island elites are laughing their a&* off in their gated beachfront communities watching people like me point out the truth and get barked off by the very people we're trying to enlighten. It's a lost cause. You gotta help yourself at some point. They used to tease me in high school that if I wanted statehood all I had to do was pick one, since there were 50. I did, and I'm the better for it, joke's on them. They remain back home with that slogan and no job, no peace, no quality of life and the future of repeating the same for their children. An island full of college graduates working middle manager best buy jobs and master degree holding govt secretaries. Meh, I'll pass.
WOAO, I mean WAO, the best description ever of Puerto Rico and its population regarding the island's status. You my friend nailed it.
You have to overhaul the way Puerto Ricans define themselves in the context of their US citizenship. This is to say, you have to open the island up to the educational and business opportunities the mainland offers. This entails dispossessing the PR ruling class from their ability to define for the average puerto rican what it means to be one. Bi-culturalism has to be pushed forth as a value-adding trait, and not as cultural suicide as it is currently portrayed. Bi-lingualism has to be embraced by the median puerto rican in the same capacity, a value-adding trait, not cultural suicide.
The most logical conclusion for this outcome on a macro level would be statehood, but said outcome is unlikely right off the chute since there is no incentive for the CONUS to entertain it and there is a cultural dead-lock in the island for it. What needs to happen is the administration needs to go after the tentacles of the octopus before going for its head. This means re-incentivizing mainland industries to do business in the island, refocus the budget from the current one trick pony of putting everybody on the govt payroll and more into a CONUS-centric educational system aimed at highlighting the importance of bilingual proficiency and more exchanges with CONUS universities at the college level. The reason puerto ricans don't feel american is quite literally because the majority thinks of the mainland as a far away land that neither understands them nor represents them. These educational gap fills would change that perception and provide access to the median puerto rican to the idea that the CONUS is not just for the PR elite but rather it is accessible to all those who possess the mere DESIRE to change their condition. You get the majority of college graduates from UPR to adopt this bi-cultural mentality and you would be amazed at the social progress the island can achieve in 10 years.
Furthermore, environmentalists in the island need to be squashed. They are pawns of the PR elite. They promote anti-business agendas that keep the average puerto rican poor and uneducated. They accomplish this by vilifying progressive business and offer the preservation of a 'pristine' island preserved in a time capsule as an inherently valuable pursuit. This is nonsense and needs to be reversed. Folklore doesn't feed a civilization, progress does. There needs to be a counter-culture thinking group of young people that rebuke the environmentalist mantra that being pro-American and respecting one's culture is a mutually exclusive affair. The PR elite is of course at the center of this vendetta. They need to be confronted and challenged.
Finally, puerto ricans from the CONUS (second generation and beyond) need to butt out. They keep a nostalgic view of the island that does nothing to help Puerto Rico progress. It's quite selfish really. All they care about is superfluous talk about folkloric food and music, while disingenuously asserting that they "would love to retire in PR". Nonsense. If PR was good enough for them they would have made the jump already. The reality of the matter is that Ricans from the CONUS love the idea of visiting the island and telling their white friends back home that they have more to their cultural identity than a "plain white anglo-saxon" 200 year old vaguely defined cultural context that they accuse said white friends of having. Same goes for African Americans. Wake the heck up. You're not an island native, you are not vested in the idiosyncrasies of that place and therefore you are in no position to assert that cultural homogeneity (your freggin' affection for 'tostones y lechón asaó') is of more importance that the economic and social progress of 4 million people stuck in a self-appointed rejection of their ability to better their condition for a worthless irrelevancy like a beauty pageant or olympic team representation. If American progress was good enough for you it's good enough for them too.
This is how you make it happen. Will it happen? Unlikely. Which is why I left. I have bigger horizons to travel than to watch myself waste away trying to help people who don't want to help themselves.
Man, you should the Puerto Rico first senator; of course, first P. Ricans have to deal with the issue of statehood. But you gave an excellent solution to the PR's problem. Its a shame to see such a beautiful island and its people falling always in the hands of the Puerto Rico's elite and its stupid rethoric.
I would add that PR has to do something in order to keep people like hindsight2020 from moving out. A successful state should provide means to satisfy the needs and desires of individuals. hindsight2020 provided one possible solution to the problems, but his words are meaningless since they are spoken from abroad. The same words would have a different weight if spoken locally and spoken as an outcry of a community rather than by an individual.
Somehow, I think that the changes need to be more subtle and concentrate on the values and ethics at the family level. After all the corrupt politicians and the moral less elitists don't fall from the sky. It does not cost anything to respect appointments, it does not cost anything to clean up around your own house, it does not cost anything to be understanding towards others, it does not cost anything to extend a helping hand. Not all change needs to be enforced from the top down. However, it is not clear to me how to instill such values throughout PR society.
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