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COLUMNS
¡Ay, caramba!
Palm Beach Post
I’m a little concerned that I may have unwittingly chosen to live in Spain.
¡Ay, caramba!
When I bought a house in Boca Raton, I thought it was well within the United States, but I guess I hadn’t planned on a language-based determination of national borders.
Silly me. Boca Raton. The city name itself is in Spanish. Alarm bells should have been ringing.
But at the time, who knew that America would be foolish enough to elect Donald Trump as president (twice!), or that the U.S. would suddenly become the most treasured ally of Russia, and its war-criminal, killer of political rivals, kidnapper of children, Vladimir Putin?
Inconceivable, right? But that’s where we are today. Firmly on Team Bad Guys.
And now, one of our big foreign policy objectives is to normalize Putin’s invasion of his sovereign neighbor. Specifically, we’re making sure that Putin gets the spoils of his invasion made under clearly false pretenses while we get to plunder the natural resources of the attacked country we abandoned.
Trump team using 'Olympic levels of rhetorical gymnastics'
To do this, our position in so-called peace talks is to parrot the Russian talking points. One of them is that Russia has the right to the invaded areas of Ukraine because Russian is the dominant language there.
The U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff — a billionaire real estate investor whose father made women’s coats — is Trump’s representative at the talks to make sure that the United States supports the aims of the attacking country over the attacked one.
“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war and all the ingredients that led up to it,” Witkoff said.
By “complicated”, I think Witkoff means that seizing large swaths of territory in a neighboring country by a military invasion that indiscriminately slaughters civilians is hard to justify unless you employ Olympic levels of rhetorical gymnastics.
And Witkoff is apparently up to the task, because he is repeating the Russian line that an invading army has the right to seize territory where the Russian language is dominant.
"They are Russian-speaking, and there have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule," Witkoff told noted Kremlin asset and American “journalist” Tucker Carlson.
The referendums Witkoff is speaking about — and their 98% approval of the Russian invasion — are widely dismissed by international observers as “shams” orchestrated by Russia to cover its crimes.
“It is absurd that the Russian authorities would think these so-called votes, which took place at gunpoint in the presence of Russian soldiers and their proxies, are in any way credible,” Amnesty International found. “The whole exercise, which is illegal under international law, is nothing more than another deplorable act in Russia’s strategy of aggression against Ukraine.”
If you throw the referendums out, the only argument for Russia seizing the territory of a sovereign nation is that the people in these areas of Ukraine are comfortable speaking Russian.
And that’s the argument that the U.S. is taking to help its new ally, Russia.
So I guess that I'm living in Spain after all?
This has me worried I may be unwittingly living in Spain. That’s because the same logic that makes the Donbas region of Ukraine part of Russia, could be used to return much of Florida to Spain.
After all, Florida has been a territory of Spain far longer than it has been part of the United States.
It was Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon who gave the state its name, and first claimed it for that European country in 1513. Florida was under Spanish rule for most of the next three hundred years.
It wasn’t formally transferred by Spain to the United States until 1821, when it was part of a deal that settled foreign debts.
Uh-oh, somebody warn Miami-Dade ... Broward and Palm Beach too!
Considering our position on Ukraine, we’re opening ourselves up to an envoy from Spain declaring that parts of Florida where Spanish is the dominant language should be returned to its rightful historical mother country of Spain.
Hasta la vista, Miami-Dade County, where an estimated 70% of the population speaks Spanish, which is the language spoken at home by a majority of county residents.
And it’s not only Miami. The percentages of residents who speak Spanish in Broward and Palm Beach counties have been trending upwards.
While not as high as Miami-Dade, the other areas of South Florida have seen bilingual residents grow while fluency in English remains a challenge.
In Palm Beach County about one in five households speak Spanish at home.
Representatives from Spain could persuasively argue that despite chronic efforts to make English the official language in Florida, state residents, particularly in South Florida, have resisted these calls, while stubbornly clinging to the musical language of their historical mother country.
Go to any construction site, restaurant kitchen, nursing home or other place of employment where essential, hard work is being done in South Florida, and the language you’ll hear in the air is Spanish.
If we keep on insisting that Russia gets to keep invaded areas of Ukraine based on the language spoken there, we’re setting ourselves up to losing South Florida to Spain.
¡Dios mi?o!
I may need to move to Canada to keep my U.S. citizenship.
Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, which is part of the USA Today Network-Florida. He can be reached at [email protected].