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i identify with Diocleciano´s response, and i think that is what we should all be aware of as we shift our concentration to more pressing issues, like learning to work all together, fighting corruption, fixing up this precious island. It seems to me that people have lost focus on what´s important (raising our quality of life; progress), and have narrowed themselves simply to finding more and more arguments to support their point of view on what would be the "correct" political status; ignoring how crime and corruption and division among the people is destroying us at a terrifying rate. We may be forgetting that the real work to be done is not to convince the nation through strong words, but though actions. Actions that show to the nation our strengths, our culture, our self-respect, our unity, our intelligence, our ability to fend for ourselves with pride regardless of whether some other nation wants to be there for us or not. We need to support our sense of pride with actions. We don´t necessarily need to wait for someone else to define our political status in order to then start working from there for a better quality of life on the island, if we are sure that no matter what, every single cell in our body is and will always be puertorrican. i think we are perfectly capable RIGHT NOW of assuming our responsabilities as the cultural entity that we are and working towards our own progress regardless of what´s the status, and once we create the strong nation we want, the political status needed to maintain the high quality of life we have attained, will be self evident. Quite frankly i am tired of listening to certain groups try to convince the nation that we are too weak a people to stand for ourselves and need a "parent nation" to look over us as if we were children; i´m tired of being frequently reminded by other groups how we are so weak minded that we will allow a brain-washing from another country to destroy our culture; and i´m tired of yet other groups placing secondary issues such as sports and beauty pageants over more crucial issues such as our quality of life and economy when examining the best alternative for our island´s progress. These arguments may work to convince people to think their way on status, but they also destroy our sense of self-worth, self-respect, and are downright degrading, especially when we start believing them. We may be able to work it out perfectly fine as an independent nation because we´ll have our self-determination, or we may be able to work it out fine as another U.S. state because we will have found the way to absorb the best of a foreign culture without destroing our own. But if we sit around to wait on which one of the two is going to happen, we´re going to get nowhere. We need to start working NOW, as the puertorricans that we are, on a way to strengthen the island´s economy NOW, on ways to unify the people NOW, on ways to raise our quality of life NOW, and once that ground has been won, we will know if the goal was acheived because we worked as an independent nation or because we worked in cooperation with another nation.Then, not only will we be a stronger people, but the necessary political status will be self-evident to everyone.
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