Malibu morning picture of the day - St. Patrick's Day, Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Dear Family, Friends, and Gentle Readers,

'tis Tuesday and here is your picture for today:

A little bit of a change from  yesterday, more clouds today. Here's the 2nd look. Now this one looks somewhat the same as yesterday.












Today is St. Patrick's Day, which I suppose we think of more like Irish Heritage Day than anything else. We no longer think about the Irish as a beleaguered minority in this country, but we used to. They were relegated to the hard manual labor jobs like housekeeping and construction assistants. But somewhere along the line, they became "white," and then everything became OK.

Guatemalan man from
Center for Justice and Accountability
website - cga.org

Vicente Fox, former president of  Mexico;
I  have no problem calling this
Latino male "white"

I had a conversation with someone at work (not a minority--Irish mostly now that I think of it ...) who was responding to recent news stories about how America will soon turn into a "minority majority" country, and what would that mean? I suspect not much. I picked up this thread with my son-in-law recently and my prediction is that sometime in my remaining lifetime (I'm 57), the majority will decide that, like the Irish, Jews, Germans, Poles, and Italians before them, Latinos will become "white." The majority will then become white again. Second- and 3rd-generation Latinos will give up the need to find identity in their minority culture, lose the language, and quickly marry and raise children in the great American mass culture.

Kazakh people from
forumbiodiversity.com

Now don't get me wrong, if you're a Latino who looks more like a Mayan Indian than Cameron Diaz or Vicente Fox does, you'll probably be still on the outside, but don't worry, we'll come up with another name for your category, or better yet, you'll come up with one yourself that the majority will respectfully use.

So, who are the other "non-white whites" right now? I'm thinking Arabs and Iranians, Armenians and Turks are kind of halfway in, as well as Uzbeks (I've actually met a few in L.A.). Don't know about Kazakhs.

Kazakh women in traditional garb
from britannica.com;
put them in tank tops and shorts and they'll fit right in
at UC Irvine

By the way, if you're hafu (Japanese term for a half-breed) or hapa (term for a person of partial East Asian ancestry) and you want to vacation in  a country where everybody looks like you, you just might try Kazakhstan. I think it would be a GREAT pretend ancestral homeland. Don't know much about the cuisine though ... never saw a Kazakh restaurant, even in L.A.

Anyway, to pull you all the way back to the Irish, kind of, here's a picture of a pot of clover in my mother's front yard that I planted years ago when I used to live there. Clover still grows in that yard from way back. I wanted to draw some from life for an art class back in college, and I found myself back over there taking photos to refer to for the bookmark design I recently executed. There have been many droughts in L.A. since the 70s but these plants have endured.

So that is the extent of my wearin' o' the green today.


Happy St. Patrick's Day to you!

Love,
Pops