Time to Break with Tradition

By Fidel "Butch" Montoya

I can recall the memories of sitting around the big Philco radio we had at home. In the evening after supper, not having a big wide flat screen in our home back then, it was customary to sit around the radio and listen to far away places my father found on the short-wave band as the pot-belly stove popped in competition.

It was always the best part of the time we spent listening, trying to find a station from another country in some faraway place. Being that my father was an Ordained Minister, the selection always seem to land on a religious station with a fiery Pentecostal preacher telling us we need to repent or end up going to hell.

As I look back at those times listening with my father, we didn't miss the television set, or the fact that DVD, Blue Ray, Digital had not even been invented. The other option we had to listen to music was a pink record player where we played gospel music from the Hermanos Alavarado, the Statesmen, or the Oregta Brothers from Michigan.

It had a radio on it as well, but if we got caught listening to Rock n Roll music, we were in trouble. My Father had a rule that did not allow secular music on this long playing record player. My father was very strict about what we listened to on the big Philco Radio, or the records we played, or if we even dared to turn on the little radio in the record player.

Growing up and looking back at what we didn't know then, or not having even a black and white television set in our home, were the good ole days. Somehow we grew up just fine without a television or the Internet in our home.

I can't even image what it would be like to be an elementary student and have access to the Internet to do homework with. But we did have big libraries filled with books and we actually had to go to the library to search for the books or information we needed. We did not even own a typewriters to type our papers unless we were lucky to get into the library and learn how to type.

Compared to today, you can say it was a bit more difficult to research information for the term paper or just check out a book from the library to read a book. We made the effort to go to the library, because we enjoyed reading and being surrounded by so many books.

The one word that comes back to me about those days is tradition. On those evenings we gathered around the radio, this was our family time. Depending on the radio program we were listening to, we might have talked about the day at school, or listen to Mom and Dad talk about some issues they may have been facing, or if we knew the songs on the radio, we might join in and sing those old fashion Gospel songs together.

Today, little by little, those traditional practices we shared as a family slip away. Most people today may have two or three flat screen televisions in their home and rarely watch them as a family.

Home music centers where you can set the mood give people an option to listen to the music the the way it was supposed to be heard. Today, even if you are not at home, you can still record movies or televison programs you may have missed while at work, school, or church. With digital technology, you can order movies or programs to watch when you want to watch these programs.

I mentioned we may have been at Church while recording a movie.  Today, Church attendance is not even a priority for most families.  The traditional value of going to Church is slowly slipping away like other cultural beliefs we were taught as children.

No one has time to sit around the television set anymore as a family. The younger kids are on the Internet, the IPad, the IPhone, or playing digital games that seem like real life situations.

Little by little our long held traditional values have changed. I became a Democrat because my Dad said the Democrats did more for us than the Republicans. My Dad expected us to register to vote when we finally reached that magic age and to register as a Democrat.

At first it was no big deal, because Dad said the Democrats would take care of us. Even my Tio Meno said they were the party to vote for. He served in Korea, so I respected what he always told me.

When it came time to vote, we voted straight down the line for Democrats, even if we didn't know what some candidate stood for. With time passing, I begin questioning whether my Dad was right.

Maybe in the old days the Democrats took care of us, but as I begin to question where Democratic candidates stood on the big issues like education and jobs, I was often disappointed. I even wondered how they may have voted while back in Washington, D.C.

I soon realized that other than boxes of cheese, powered milk, peanut butter, I couldn't see how they were taking care of us.

We voted for Democrats, but still could not speak Spanish in school.  The Draft meant we were the first ones to war, and the ones that came home in a flag wrapped coffin. 

With time slipping by, with traditions changing with time and technology, the Internet soon provided a resource we could use to review how our Democratic friends voted for, while out of sight in Washington, D.C.  Often we found that the big D was not taking care of us anymore, but it was simply just traditional for us to vote for Democrats.

As we look around our schools, our neighborhoods, our quality of life, are we are better now than four years ago?  I still find myself questioning why we are still losing so many students as dropouts, and why we are still expected to take jobs we are good with our hands. Everyone is willing to give us a chance to use our hands, but never believing we could also use our minds and intelligence to solve the problems we face.

We have a large segment of young professional Latinos from our community that are still pushing the big D ballot. In my opinion, it is because they have forgotten our past, our leaders, and our goals for a better life. They have so little respect for the elders in our Latino community who paved the way for so many of them.  Some of these young professionals do not even know our Latino American past and contributions.

Today they have the degrees, sometimes two or three and the big professional jobs that go with their degrees. But the most important gift they are missing is they have very little Wisdom or knowledge from the college of hard knocks.

Without tradition, the wisdom and grace we gather from God's Blessing as we travel through life experiences, means there is a lack of understanding of the struggles we faced as these young kids went through their lives unaware or uninterested in our heritage and traditions.

This election year - 2012, I am going to break tradition as well.

The Democrats have done very little for us. Oh yes, they promise great things, they promise to stand up for us and our issues, but then always seem to back down when the political heat flares up in the halls of Washington, D.C. when it involves our interests.

Come election day in November, I will not vote for the Democratic candidate for President of the USA. I am sorry Dad, but as you watch from above, you will see that our pride and tradition of who we are, is gone.
                                                                            
On election day, I am breaking away from tradition and from the past.  I am going to vote for Governor Mitt Romney for President.

It is time to give the other good guys a chance to build a new tradition. I expect the GOP will open the doors to the "big tent" and let more of us in.

Governor Romney, you have my vote, please don't let me down.