The times they are a-changin’

Gregorio Cruz, you’re quite a busy guy writing incessant will-o-the-wisp commentaries as Charles P. Reyes said, with “no credibility and no consistent principles or convictions.”

Maybe you can clarify some nagging questions about your philippic philosophy. But first, you deserve to be complimented on the escalating absurdity and the elevated quality of your ranting.

Your harangues directed this week at the honorable Representatives, Tina M. Sablan and Heinz S. Hofschneider, and last week to the earnest and thoughtful Mr. Alfredo Antolin, Jr. were remarkable.

Your rhetoric has become uncommonly brazen! You have surpassed yourself in ludicrousness. Do you really do this by yourself?

Whatever the case, your consternation must be terribly discomforting. We know, too, how painfully preoccupied you are these days about the fait accompli of federalization and the growing sentiment favoring improved residency status for resident foreign workers in the Commonwealth.

Many of us share an interest in these subjects but with a somewhat different understanding of the issues.

You’ve also been fretting quite a bit lately about your so-called detractors. But not to worry, Greg. You’re part of a valuable dialogue. This is a democratic society and [Mr. Cruz] can say whatever he wants to say, as the honorable Rep. Hofschneider recently said. We understand that you don’t need detractors or ghostwriters for that matter.

You do a fine job of revealing who you are on your own with increasingly malignant denunciation of everything that displeases you as if your personal preferences and prejudices were universal truths.

You give clear-thinking, morally responsible people many things to write about. You must continue to say whatever (you) want to say. The fagaga speaks for itself. Speaking entirely for myself, since no ones appointed me universal spokesman of anything, I’ll admit that I don’t know everything.

For example, I dont know how you ascended to the pulpit as omniscient arbiter of all things Tao Tao Tano. Can you explain how you know what everyone among the tao tao tano thinks? I know some local citizens who question your sanity. I wouldn’t go quite that far.

But, if, as your writing implies, you’re the authentic voice of all indigenous people in the Marianas, I imagine it would be just as implausibly absurd to declare myself Emperor of Managaha.

I could stand on the beach and spend my days shouting useless and pointless assertions into the inevitable winds of change whimpering about how my homeland was eroding out from under me.

Or I could come to terms with the forces of reality and accept that tide and time were reshaping the land into something perhaps more magnificent than it was before. Know what I mean?

There’s actually another significant question that inquiring minds in the Commonwealth would like you to answer if you can. It concerns how you came by your U.S. citizenship.

Did you “stand in line and go through the process just like everyone else” as you demand that our invited long-term resident workers do? Or was American citizenship conferred on you by blanket decree one day, entirely unearned, as a legal proclamation or an act of legislation?

Wasn’t your citizenship simply awarded to you by virtue of your family being in the Marianas for the prescribed period? It’s a relevant question, Greg, in light of your interminable braying about citizenship rights.

You might recall something that other members of this community have understood for a long time. The United States freed the Marianas from the slave master Japanese Empire initiating a chain of circumstances that opened the door for you and all NMD people to eventually become U.S. citizens.

And what were your qualifications for that privilege? You qualified by your defined ancestry and by having lived in the Marianas for the required time. In all honesty, Greg, you didn’t “stand in line and go through the process just like everyone else,” did you?

Your citizenship was a given to you by a decision of the United States of America, wasn’t it? Isn’t that the story? Whatever the case, you’re a lucky boy to be an American citizen, aren’t you? Or would you prefer to publicly and officially renounce your U.S. citizenship?

Just curious. Looking a little farther back, it seems reasonable to assume that you might agree that before the American liberation of the Marianas, the oppression of indigenous people by the Japanese administration was an atrocity. If you acknowledge that point, can you explain how it might be morally justifiable now for a political system administered largely by freed indigenous citizens to operate with legalistic mechanisms and attitudes intended to disenfranchise, subjugate and perpetuate a subservient underclass of other longstanding members of the community?

Oppression now, in any guise, cannot be any more justifiable than it was under the Japanese, can it?

My hope is that there’s a lesson here that you can appreciate, although, in light of your social, political, and historical myopia, I am doubtful of its power to inform you.

In a nutshell, the long-term legally working resident Filipinos, Chinese, Thais, Bangladeshis, Koreans. and legally present other nationalities who have assembled the infrastructure, toiled in the service industries, cheerfully welcomed and catered to the islands tourists and who have performed the other great labors that built a measure of prosperity for the Commonwealth, have the moral and legal right to ask for… and to demand, if need be… improved immigration status in this American territory.

Our productive long-term legal resident guests who have worked with us, for us and among us for many years have now earned the same opportunity within the unique social, political, and economic environment that is the CNMI to enjoy the privilege of citizenship that was previously granted to you.

It is that simple, your futile outdated territorial defensiveness and xenophobia notwithstanding. While it’s understandable and appropriate for everyone to hold on to an identity, indigenous identification became politically subordinate to an American identity with the advent of the American era in the Marianas.

National identity is primary. Like it or not, the legal and political reality of belonging to a nation means that regional, cultural, ethnic, indigenous, and parochial identities fall into second place behind the national identity. The people of the islands are not citizens of the Commonwealth. They are residents of the Commonwealth and citizens of the United States of America.

That is the advantage, the commitment and the obligation that was accepted with the formation of a political union with the U.S. The honorable and wise representative, Tina M. Sablan, invariably defends your right to speak your mind freely. And I would not disagree.

So if you deign to speak your mind in response to this account with another of your sophomoric tirades, have at it.

But do consider this:

Your old road is rapidly agin’.

Please get out of the new one

If you can’t lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin’.[/I]

I believe Bob Dylan said that. And meanwhile, Gregorio S. Cruz, Jr., be assured that morally responsible people of good conscience, sincere people from every ethnicity, including many Tao Tao Tano, are also watching YOU like a HAWK… and I said that.
[B] K. F. H. O’Hartnett[/B] [I]Saipan[/I]