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The rainy day

EditorialThe rainy day
“ … in the perspective of history this difference between natives and newcomers was critical. Time and again native leaders, from Moctezuma to Powhatan to Red Cloud, thought they could buy off the newcomers with gold or land cessions or treaties, only to discover too late that it wasn’t possible to buy white men off: they were in this peculiar way incorruptible. At the same time the tribes bought the whites’ promises that certain lands would be theirs forever – the Iroquois Confederacy lands, the whole of the trans-Mississippi West, the Black Hills, Indian Territory – only to learn too late that the whites wanted all of it, every acre. So, the Iroquois lands became New York State, the trans-Mississippi West became the appointed goal of Manifest Destiny, the Black Hills became South Dakota, and Indian Territory, Oklahoma. It was not, as so often charged, that the natives were stupid in their dealings with the whites, capable of selling huge tracts of land for a few dollars and a mirror. But there is no doubt they never really understood them.”  
  
   –      pg. 6, INTRODUCTION by Frederick Turner to Geronimo, Penguin Books, New York, 1996
   –     
 
The credit unions say that they are an umbrella to protect you on the proverbial rainy day. The Roman poet Horace put it this way – “In time of peace, prepare for war.”
 
One of the problems with organizing and mobilizing our people is that those of us who are educated, in most cases assume money management as a part of our portfolio. We were programmed from childhood to be prudent, to save, to be honest, and so on and so forth. 
 
Our educated citizens – the “talented tenth,” to use the words of the African American scholar, W.E.B. DuBois, become frustrated when they are confronted by the reckless personal economics of the masses of the people. Many of our educated citizens write off the masses, because educated Belizeans cannot understand why the masses of Belizeans, especially in the urban settings, behave the way they do, and then complain. To educated citizens, there are simple money management decisions which would improve the lot of the masses.
 
On Partridge Street, which began with UBAD and is now Kremandala, we have always considered the situation from a different perspective from that of our educated, professional citizens. This different perspective is why we have been considered revolutionary, ragamuffin, or whatever. The recklessness of the Belizean masses derives from their bubbling energy and their consciousness of being oppressed. The masses of our people behave the way they do because this is how they are rebelling against an unjust order of things.
 
Any program wherein the educated classes insist on trying to have the masses behave the way they, the educated classes do, is doomed to failure. The system in place in Belize is the system of white supremacy. It is a global system. There are too many of our educated citizens who employ all kinds of sophistry to convince themselves, and us, that this is not the case. But the masses of the Belizean people know that there is something wrong, and their agitated quest is for some form of equal rights and justice. The masses do not believe that saving and scrimping is the solution to injustice. The masses, simply speaking, want more. They want more of this luscious cake they see all around them.
 
We have previously described the philosophical dichotomy between the bourgeois and the roots members of the same group, as originally reflected in our responses to slavery. The bourgeois-minded slaves worked and saved to buy their freedom. The roots slaves were reckless. They ran away, or they rebelled violently against the master. Same problem, different solution.   But, at the end of the day, one set of people.
 
There is a legend that when Hitler’s Germans invaded Russia in 1941, the Russian general Zhukov, opened the prisons to release the most energetic and desperate of his people – Russian prisoners. It was war, you see. The point is that sometimes there is a need for even those citizens you consider los desgraciados.
 
There is no way the talented tenth can transform the masses of the people in our lifetime. Even if they were able to transform the masses, do you think this would solve our community and societal problems? We don’t think so, because the greed of the modern slavemasters, just as the greed of the ancient ones, is insatiable, absolutely insatiable. There must be an element of resistance amongst an oppressed people, and that resistance comes from the masses of the people, usually assisted by educated freedom fighters, such as Fidel Castro in Cuba, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
 
The rainy day has come to Belize, and it is all about white supremacy and corporate greed. We won’t say institutionalized racism, because we would then have to indict religious fanaticism. Let’s just say this rainy day is about white supremacy and corporate greed. This rainy day is not about God. It is about greedy men who have no love in their hearts.
 
All power to the people.

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