Tony Alcaraz

America is a very proud country, which is why those of us who have served in the military are proud to serve. My service has given me the chance to advance, to provide for my children, even to share many of my military benefits with my wife and children. I’m very proud of America for that: This country takes care of those who have served.

Service has also given me lifetime relationships, lasting connections I’ve made with all sorts of people. I have two friends that are retired who live nearby here in San Antonio. We’re friends to this day, and they loved their experience, too.

The life lessons, the growing up, the maturing – those are all benefits that I don’t think that people who haven’t served might think about at first.

Of course, our land provides great resources, and with them great opportunity for prosperity and success.

I’m a proven example of what’s possible: I’m going to be 50 this year, and I haven’t finished my degree, but – just by working hard, having some education, and being able to apply what I’ve learned together with a positive, consistent work ethic – I have had the opportunity to be prosperous.

I’ve been sure to take advantage of that opportunity. And, I’ve been able to advance, to learn, and to take advantage of all the things afforded to me because America is a capitalist country. It’s through our American version of capitalism that the people who do the work and the companies that employ them are afforded opportunities. Thanks to America’s free market, I’ve done well and the owner who put in the equity to create the business that employs me also has the ability to prosper.

This success is twofold, and I appreciate that.

Our education system – and our healthcare systems, too – are the best in the world. People can come here and get the resources they need. Not every country provides those sorts of resources to you. As a result, America truly is a melting pot. We have more ethnicities probably than any other country in the world.

I know people who got here whose family was from India, or from the Middle East, and they all prospered. They prospered because they were eager to take advantage of the opportunities offered to them. Case in point: I dropped my stepdaughter off at UC Davis and was part of a huge melting pot. I met fathers from Germany, from Korea, from all over. Families whose first language wasn’t English but who were eager to take advantage of the resources America provides.

The same is true of San Antonio. This is a huge military town, and you have people from outside of Texas and outside of San Antonio that come here for education. A good portion of people in San Antonio are either second or third generation Americans, they’re part of the Latino community, and they’re motivated by education. Maybe back in my grandfather’s time and even part of my mother’s time, education wasn’t necessarily promoted 100 % because people thought as long as you just work hard you’re going to find your way among the Latino community. But now, people value education most of all, especially along the border because of the economic challenge they’re facing.

That’s what we as Americans want, right? As a citizen, I would say that we all want to improve. We could always improve –improve ourselves, improve as a country, and improve as a society.

Where we are as a country right now is very much driven by our media, and we need to recognize that there’s some form of censorship taking place – no matter where you get your information. My voice or your voice is competing with millions of others on social media. I may be able to speak clearly but I can’t be sure that the kind of information I have to share – or the kind of information I discover on my own on Twitter or Tick Tock –is being shared with others in the same way. On the other side – on CNN, Fox or other more conventional channels like those – we are only seeing the window of the political conversation they focus on.

Somehow this all needs to be monitored so that everybody gets good information, so that you can say, “Okay, well I can believe in what I’m receiving. It’s not swayed one way or the other.”

I trust our government to give me information that I can decipher myself.

During COVID, our government made it possible for people to get vaccinated in record time – in 18 months. But from where I work within the government sector, not everything that happened then went perfectly. I can see we still have a long way to go before a good portion of our citizens trust our institutions.

Now, we’re starting to understand some of the consequences of that quick COVID rollout. Some people are saying that it all happened too fast, or that there might be side effects that we didn’t see at the time. But there’s more and more information available and I think one thing that our institutions have learned from COVID is that the more information they share with its citizens the more Americans trust them.

That confidence in the people is very much an American thing: People in countries like China, Russia, North Korea – their government doesn’t share that type of information with them.

I trust the institutions and I trust that the president – whoever it is, Democrat or Republican –is doing what’s best for our country.

I trust that checks and balances are still in place to prohibit that person from doing something that’s not in our country’s interests.