Last night I attended a quinceañera celebration down at a local municipal park. I haven’t been to a quinceañera since I was 17 and in Paraguay. I remember dancing all night. Now I’m 39 and I didn’t do any dancing whatsoever, but only because the Mexican family throwing the party happens to be Seventh Day Adventists.
It was extremely odd to be sitting in the converted bathouse of my old municipal swimming pool, surrounded by hundreds of Mexicans—all of them under fifty—men, women, pregnant women, and many, many children. I say odd, because, back when I was young, there wasn’t one single person of Mexican origin living here in southeastern Minnesota. It surprises me that this dramatic change in demographics has occurred in only half a life-span.
“They have such optimism”, I thought, “But how can they not? To have come from a land of dire scarcity to a land of such seeming material abundance, how can they not?" This birthday party was far more extravagant than my own wedding in 2001. The tables were blooming with colorful balloons, plastic tablecloths and plastic floral arrangements. Heaping, steaming vats of meat simmered in the kitchen, the equivalent, no doubt, of an entire steer. A waterfall shimmied down a 4 tier cake. At least 12 girls were decked out like bridesmaids, and the young lady who turned 15 arrived in a stretch SUV. Most of the vehicles in the parking lot were of the SUV variety as well.
I know that the mother of the family had been saving for at least 2 years for this party. I wanted to be happy for them, and I was, but at the same time I was held in check by my obviously overwrought mind. I just kept thinking, “But this abundance won’t last, you know; you are only catching the tail end here.” All I could think of was one of the conclusions from Jared Diamond's Collapse: that the world cannot support the sheer numbers of the third world trying to aim for first-world standards of consumption. That it’s time for us to scale back NOW—or nature will scale things back for us.
Fortunately I just read a new, somewhat overwrought book on the Black Death (thus my state of mind), with the comforting assurance that even if a Malthusian crisis occurs and plague sweeps the earth, the humans that manage to survive will do a much more sensible job of managing the earth’s resources, as, apparently, happened in the 15th century. (Whew! Now I can sleep at night.)
It’s part of what I mean when I say if the world suffers catastrophic change, it’ll be good for us—in the long run. But I can't help but feel there’ll be hell to go through, in the meantime. I know this, and that’s what has me worried on an immediate level. All these superempowered angry men suffering from the cultural dislocations of globalization are not going to make things easy on the rest of us, not with their accessibility to lethal technology and new outlets & avenues for hatred. Political manifestations are going to get ugly—reactionary, nativist, and nasty.
And all those beautiful children last night. Optimism is evidently a relative thing.
I'd like to think I still have optimism--that a certain genetic, pioneer spirit still runs though my blood--but would I bring another child into the world to prove it?
I’ve sensed a change in the air these past several months, and I see I’m not the only one. It isn't so much uneasiness in my consumer confidence as much as it is shame. Yet I don’t feel pessimistic. I feel that my mind, and heart and spirit are going to be challenged in significant ways in the future and, really, I crave it.
7:50:15 PM 
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