Carta al Editor de Atención

Editor,

I was reading the Atención on a flight to Minneapolis. I thoroughly enjoyed it and was prompted to send some thoughts.

Many articles in the Atención address concerns for the future of San Miguel de Allende, offering speculation about what quality of life is imminent. Some writers like the scholarly Ma. De la Paz Espino in her September 28, 2007 article on pg 15 in the “Readers Forum,” offers profound insights, ironically obscured to the inattentive by the writer’s succinctness and intellect. (It seems that we retirees sometimes become lulled into a state of intellectual complacency.) Most commentaries express concerns about physical realities of traffic, a lack of control of construction, evidence of the seeds of urban sprawl, the negative effects of big-bus emissions on air quality and the like. The focus appears to be more symptom than cause.

If we could focus on the importance of developing and sustaining core beliefs and human values in the macro community, the criteria for making those decisions that will impact our quality of life in the micro environments would be availed. Defining and then conforming to a value system are fundamentally expedient. Rather than addressing the range of ill effects that poor decisions manifest in their wake, forethought about decisions and more scrutiny of their compliance to defined values is the more orderly, logical, timely and effective problem-solving approach: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”—the apropos allusion.

I enjoy San Miguel de Allende for many reasons—colonial quaintness, pueblo ambience, diversity, beauty and so on; however, what keeps me here is the quality of people—the human element. I suggest the obvious: that if we focus on education, the support of our human resource, we will find the means to develop and nurture effective problem solving, capitalizing on both local insight and talent. The value of education, then, must be one of our core beliefs. Our abstract learners would recognize that such issues as ethnocentrism, greed and corruption, secularism gone rampant and other attitudes manifest concretely across our environment.

From my point of view, I see a glimmer of the “principle-to-practice” approach in existence. It is my hope that by calling attention to this positive problem-solving strategy, that very approach is promoted.

Jay Vlasak